Unpacking Students’ Engagement with Feedback

Learners of all levels receive a plethora of feedback messages on a daily – or even hourly – basis. Teachers, coaches, parents, peers – all have suggestions and advice on how to improve or sustain a certain level of performance.

This volume offers insights into the complexity of students’ engagement with feedback, the diversity of teachers’ feedback practices, and the influence of personal assessment beliefs in tension with prevailing contexts. It focuses on two main sections: what is students’ engagement with feedback? And what is the variety of teachers’ feedback practices? Under these themes, the content covers a broad range of key topics pertaining to instructional feedback, how it operates in a classroom and how students engage with feedback. Unarguably, feedback is a key element of successful instructional practices – however we also know that (a) learners often dread it and dismiss it and (b) the effectiveness of feedback varies depending on teacher’s and student’s characteristics, specific characteristic of feedback messages that learners receive, as well as a number of contextual variables. What this volume articulates are new ways for learners to engage with feedback beyond recipience and uptake.

With nuanced insights for research and practice, this book will be most useful to teachers, university teacher educators, and researchers working to design and enact new ways of engaging with feedback in schools and beyond.

Anastasiya A. Lipnevich is a professor of educational psychology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research interests include instructional feedback, formative assessment, alternative ways of cognitive and non-cognitive assessment, and the role of psychosocial characteristics in individuals’ academic and life achievement.

Jessica To is an education research scientist at National Institute of Education (NIE), Nanyang Technological University. Her research interests lie in learner-centered feedback designs, feedback partnerships, peer and self-assessment as well as dialogic use of exemplars.

Kelvin Tan Heng Kiat is an associate professor with National Institute of Education’s Learning Sciences and Assessment Academic Group. He instructs school leaders in the Leadership in Education program in NIE for learning, and his research interests are on assessment literacy and leadership.