The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback

TLDR

Student feedback literacy refers to the understandings, capacities, and dispositions required to interpret feedback and use it to improve work or learning strategies. This conceptual paper reviews student responses to feedback, identifies barriers to uptake, and proposes a four‑feature framework—appreciating feedback, making judgments, managing affect, and taking action—to guide feedback literacy development. The framework is operationalized through peer feedback and exemplar analysis, with suggestions for explicitly refocusing these activities to cultivate students’ feedback literacy. Teachers facilitate feedback literacy by designing curricula, providing guidance, and coaching, and the paper concludes with recommendations for practice and a research agenda.

Abstract

Student feedback literacy denotes the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies. In this conceptual paper, student responses to feedback are reviewed and a number of barriers to student uptake of feedback are discussed. Four inter-related features are proposed as a framework underpinning students' feedback literacy: appreciating feedback; making judgments; managing affect; and taking action. Two well-established learning activities, peer feedback and analysing exemplars, are discussed to illustrate how this framework can be operationalized. Some ways in which these two enabling activities can be re-focused more explicitly towards developing students' feedback literacy are elaborated. Teachers are identified as playing important facilitating roles in promoting student feedback literacy through curriculum design, guidance and coaching. The implications and conclusion summarise recommendations for teaching and set out an agenda for further research.