Developing Student Feedback Literacy through Exemplars, Peer Feedback and Self-evaluation

Abstract

Feedback is the key element of formative assessment, and feedback is only feedback when students manage to act upon it (Carless & Boud, 2018). Students can only act upon feedback when they appreciate and understand feedback, are capable of making evaluative judgments and manage their affect (Carless & Boud, 2018). Many suggestions are made on how to stimulate these capabilities, known as student feedback literacy, through educational activities. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that these activities actually develop student feedback literacy. In this study several of those activities, including using exemplars (Carless, 2020), providing and receiving peer feedback (Carless & Boud, 2018) and self-evaluation (Malecka et al., 2020) are combined in an intervention. With the use of semi-structured interviews pre- and post-intervention the effect of this intervention on the development of student feedback literacy is measured. All students showed progress in one or more features of student feedback literacy after the intervention, most of them in the appreciation and judgment feature. No one showed progress in all four features of student feedback literacy. Activities to stimulate student feedback literacy should be core elements of the curriculum, and therefore this study should be prolonged to see the effect after several interventions.