Read a review of our Focus on Feedback Seminar

2 April 2024

In this post Dr Jack Walton, CRADLE Research Fellow, reviews our first seminar for the CRADLE Seminar Series 2024. This seminar featured CRADLE’s Professor Phill Dawson and Professor Margaret Bearman and focused on feedback. Phill discussed the development of the Feedback Literacy Behaviour Scale and Margaret talked about feedback strategies to support doctoral candidates.

In a paired set of presentations Professor Phillip Dawson and Professor Margaret Bearman launched the CRADLE Seminar Series for 2024 with a focus on feedback—Phill introduced his work on feedback literacy, and Margaret introduced her work on feedback in higher degree settings.

Feedback Literacy

Interest in students’ role in feedback has seen a major uptick since Professor David Carless and Alfred Deakin Professor David Boud published The Development of Student Feedback Literacy (2018), which provided an impetus for focusing on the concept of student feedback literacy. That is, the ability of students to understand, appreciate, and use feedback to improve their work or learning strategies, emphasising the importance of developing feedback literacy through curriculum design and teacher facilitation.

Since then, several attempts have been made to quantify and measure feedback literacy. Sharing the development of a new feedback literacy scale, Phill proposed four potentials of feedback literacy measurement, including:

1. The support of individuals’ self-reflection,
2. to understand cohorts themselves,
3.  intervention effectiveness, and
4.  the relationship between feedback literacy.

Importantly, the focus in this new scale is on what students do in feedback as a point of distinction from a focus on what students think about feedback. Reflecting on the work, Phill emphasised that disagreement remains about feedback literacy itself, and that, while measurement tools cannot provide a complete picture, the practice of constructing measurement tools can itself help us as researchers to understand and articulate the concepts with which we work.

• Read more and get the feedback literacy scale here

Feedback in Doctoral Studies

Pivoting into the world of doctoral feedback practices, Margaret argued for the need to better understand how feedback strategies can support doctoral students. While feedback can of course address challenges students face in their work, Margaret reminded us that it can also be the cause of them. Taking us through an analysis of the literature on supervisory feedback, Margaret described a view of doctoral feedback practices sensitised by conceptual frames from ‘new paradigm’ feedback (Carless, 2015) and sociomateriality (Fenwick et al., 2012). Pulling out some key themes of this analysis Margaret highlighted:

• The significance of feedback as power,
• the often underdiscussed influence of talk between supervisors and students,
• the place of text-based feedback as durable and intersectional with talk, and
• the changes that can happen through the extended timeline of a doctoral project—including, for example:
  • shifts in how supervisors provided suggestions,
  • what their feedback addressed, and
  • how students modified their ways of responding to feedback over time.

Margaret left us with the suggestion that relationships, multiple perspectives, and standards could be understood as practical strategies, and that this space is rich with opportunity to connect to other concepts such as evaluative judgement and feedback literacy, and for the value of support from an institutional standpoint in fostering these strategies.

• Read Margaret's research here

Following the presentation, CRADLE supplied refreshments (including cake!), so if you are in town for the next seminar, we’d love to see you in-person!

About Jack Walton

Jack recently joined CRADLE as a Research Fellow working on a two year program of research ‘Assessment in a time of genAI’. Jack came to CRADLE from the University of Queensland and holds a Bachelor of Music. Jack’s PhD developed a theorisation of assessment in university music education.

His main research interests include assessment, judgement, and creative practice.

References

Feedback Literacy

Carless, D., & Boud, D. (2018) The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 43(8), 1315-1325. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2018.1463354

Dawson, P., Yan, Z., Lipnevich, A., Tai, J., Boud, D. & Mahoney, P. (2023) Measuring what learners do in feedback: the feedback literacy behaviour scale. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2023.2240983

Feedback in Doctoral Studies

Fenwick, T., Nerland, M., & Jensen, K. (2012) Sociomaterial approaches to conceptualising professional learning and practice. Journal of Education and Work, 25(1), 1-13, https://doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2012.644901

Carless, D. (2015). Excellence in University Assessment (1st ed.). Routledge.

Bearman, M., Tai, J., Henderson, M., Esterhazy, R., Mahoney, P. & Molloy, E. (2024) Enhancing feedback practices within PhD supervision: a qualitative framework synthesis of the literature. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2024.2307332