It has become a standard feature of education: giving and receiving development-oriented feedback. Unfortunately, the good intentions don't always hit the mark. “That is a shame, because feedback is an important developmental pillar for students,” Lieke Jager explains. She investigates what is needed to improve feedback-oriented learning, in line with Radboud University's new educational vision and the Radboud Teachers Academy's new curriculum. A necessity, as evaluations and international studies on feedback show that students still do not always experience feedback as development-oriented. “The value of feedback often remains unclear to students,” Jager explains. “To make feedback more valuable, we want to use this research to gain a better understanding of feedback literacy: how students experience, value, and use feedback. This with the aim of improving their feedback literacy within the study programme.”
How do you make feedback development-oriented?
Is feedback necessary for student development? Yes, absolutely. But is its current use in higher education effective? Not always. Lieke Jager, researcher and lecturer at the Radboud Teachers Academy, wants to use her research to improve feedback-oriented training. “How do we make feedback a real part of a learning path, rather than an additional parallel learning path?”
Timing is essential
In this research project, which was funded with a TLC voucher, Jager looks at both the givers and the receivers of feedback: lecturers and students. “Lecturers are used to giving feedback mainly at the end, in response to a submitted assignment or an exam. This kind of product-oriented feedback, is often not focused on the follow-up, because students usually only use that feedback if they have to do a resit. With development-oriented feedback, on the other hand, feedback is seen as a ongoing process throughout the entire study programme. Its objective is to help students to become aware of the goals they are working towards and the developmental steps needed to attain those goals.”
According to Jager, the timing of feedback is essential in this context. “This means that as a lecturer, you think about when you give feedback to the student, capitalising on where they are at that moment in their learning process. This is a challenge because not all students go through the learning process at the same pace. This increases the risk of giving a student feedback when they are not yet ready to receive it. They cannot yet see the value of your feedback and understand its content.”
Moreover, according to Jager, students indicate that feedback can unintentionally lead to increased work pressure. “Many students are already stressed because they have to learn materials and hand in assignments for several courses at the same time. They have little time to reflect on feedback, process it and find ways to use it , because the next assignment or lecture is already waiting. Add to this the fact that it is not always clear to them how the feedback from one assignment ties in with the content of the next. We need to be aware of this and take it into consideration in our study programmes. In other words, how do we make feedback a real part of a learning path, rather than an additional parallel learning path?”
Calmly and attentively
Jager is conducting her research this academic year among students taking the teacher-training minor/module at the Radboud Teachers Academy. Her research project includes analysing audio recordings of feedback processes during lectures. “The picture that emerges from this is that students find feedback especially valuable if they see how it contributes to their development,” Jager explains. “To come to this understanding, it helps if they can discuss the feedback, and its value, calmly and attentively with their lecturer or fellow students. And that sometimes feedback is not about ‘a better product’, but that it also touches on personal and/or professional development – a different way of thinking or approaching things.”
According to Jager, this revolves around two types of feedback literacy: on the one hand, how and to what extent students can and want to process feedback. And on the other hand, to the way lecturers design feedback processes within their teaching, with attention to safety and the interpersonal relationship with students. Jager: “That includes lecturers helping students to become increasingly feedback-literate: to make them aware of how they relate to feedback themselves, what the feedback process looks like, and where learning opportunities lie. This helps them later, in a professional setting, to take control of their own development and use input from others. In addition, at the Radboud Teachers Academy, we also educate teachers who provide feedback to their own secondary school pupils. We want to them to be able to teach their pupils how to learn from and with feedback, so that a society is created in which people ask each other for feedback more easily, and understand each other better.”
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