Unpacking feedback literacy processes in international students: CRADLE Seminar Series

6 August 2019

There was a strong turnout at Deakin Downtown and online for the latest presentation in our 2019 CRADLE Seminar Series; the University of Queensland’s Dr Karen Olave-Encina discussed how first-year international students develop feedback literacy in an Australian higher education context. Here, CRADLE PhD candidate Abbas Mehrabi shares his reflections on Karen’s seminar.

“Feedback”, “literacy”, and “first year students” are among the terms I have been engaged with over the last two years since I commenced my PhD project. The focus of my project is on developing first year students’ evaluative judgement of academic writing; and feedback, and the way it is practiced, is one of the main pedagogical strategies that play a critical role in fostering evaluative judgement capability. For feedback processes to have an effect on development of evaluative judgement, it is imperative that students appreciate what feedback is and how it can operate effectively, understand the discourses feedback is written in, and subsequently take action on comments.

However, there has been a growing concern that first year students are not equipped with these competencies, which are collectively referred to as feedback literacy. The following two questions, therefore, aroused my curiosity and interest to attend this seminar: how can we support first year students to develop feedback literacy? And how might development of feedback literacy be informed by evaluative judgement activities?

Karen started the presentation by discussing the importance of feedback literacy, in particular for first year international students who come from various sociocultural backgrounds and previous experiences. She argued that, while being acknowledged as one of the most effective ways of stimulating these students’ learning achievements, feedback has received low approval ratings from both students and teachers. As Karen noted, the reason is that feedback can be hard for first year students to interpret and act upon. They do not have the necessary knowledge and skills to make sense of feedback processes, to decode the language of feedback, and to use effective strategies for implementing the feedback. So what kind of interventions and strategies might be useful to alleviate these challenges in using feedback effectively? Some of the pedagogical ideas Karen recommended were:

• Feedback portfolio: using various resources, such as guided reflection sheets, to help students better see how their use of feedback might have an impact over time
• Reflections about feedback: providing students with opportunities for reflective practice on the feedback process, such as engaging them in peer feedback and dialogic feedback activities
• Speed feedback dating: changing the manner of feedback delivery to students such as using e-logs

The introduction of these ideas sparked plenty of discussion amongst attendees. Of great interest to me, however, was the common threads found between the development of feedback literacy and evaluative judgement. It became evident that, to support the development of feedback literacy, engaging students in evaluative judgement activities is important in order to produce and receive feedback on the work of self and peers. Such evaluative opportunities (e.g., peer/self-assessment) have the potential to facilitate the development of feedback literacy by fostering students’ tacit understanding of feedback processes and how they operate; the kind of understandings that occur through students’ active participation, observation and dialogue, rather than being merely passive recipients of feedback information. Therefore, making judgements is a critical component of student feedback literacy.