Shifting feedback agency to students by having them write their own feedback comments

Nicol, D. and Kushwah, L. (2023) Shifting feedback agency to students by having them write their own feedback comments. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, (doi: 10.1080/02602938.2023.2265080) (Early Online Publication)

Abstract

In higher education, there is a tension between teachers providing comments to students about their work and students developing agency in producing that work. Most proposals to address this tension assume a dialogic conception of feedback where students take more agency in eliciting and responding to others’ advice, recently framed as developing their feedback literacy. This conception does not however acknowledge the feedback agency students exercise implicitly during learning, through interactions with resources (e.g. textbooks, videos). This study therefore adopted a different framing - that all feedback is internally generated by students through comparing their work against different sources of reference information, human and material; and that agency is increased when these comparisons are made explicit. Students produced a literature review, compared it against information in two published reviews, and wrote their own self-feedback comments. The small sample size enabled detailed analysis of these comments and of students’ experiences in producing them. Results show students can generate significant self-feedback by making resource comparisons, that this feedback can replace or complement teacher feedback, be activated when required and help students fine-tune feedback requests to teachers. This widely applicable methodology strengthens students’ natural capacity for agency and makes dialogic feedback more effective.

• Item Type: Articles
• Keywords: inner feedback, comparison, self-feedback comments, student agency, feedback literacy.
• Status: Early Online Publication
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Kushwah, Dr Lovleen and Nicol, Professor David
• Authors: Nicol, D., and Kushwah, L.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > Adam Smith Business School > Economics; College of Social Sciences > Adam Smith Business School > Management
• Journal Name: Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• ISSN: 0260-2938
• ISSN (Online): 1469-297X
• Published Online: 08 October 2023
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2023 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education 2023
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License