Student feedback literacy denotes the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies. In this conceptual paper, student responses to feedback are reviewed and a number of barriers to student uptake of feedback are discussed. Four inter-related features are proposed as a framework underpinning students’ feedback literacy: appreciating feedback; making judgments; managing affect; and taking action. Two well-established learning activities, peer feedback and analysing exemplars, are discussed to illustrate how this framework can be operationalized. Some ways in which these two enabling activities can be re-focused more explicitly towards developing students’ feedback literacy are elaborated. Teachers are identified as playing important facilitating roles in promoting student feedback literacy through curriculum design, guidance and coaching. The implications and conclusion summarise recommendations for teaching and set out an agenda for further research.

While there is consensus in education that students should take a more active role in feedback processes, this is nearly always framed in terms of their making better use of lecturer or peer comments. This framing ignores that students already exercise agency and are generating inner feedback all the time, even when there are no comments from, or dialogue with others.

This Guide presents an alternative conception of feedback and a new methodology that lecturers

can use to:

• Improve students’ learning by building on their natural inner feedback capability.
• Develop students’ ability to self-regulate their learning.
• Scale up feedback for all students without any increase in lecturer commenting.
• Extend the feedback process to specifically develop students’ critical and creative thinking.
• Make learning more enjoyable by varying the information students use to generate feedback.
• Position feedback as a developmental and emotionally positive learning process.

Feedback is one of the most powerful influences on student achievement, yet it is difficult to implement productively within the constraints of a mass higher education system. Designing Effective Feedback Processes in Higher Education: A Learning-Focused Approach addresses the challenges of developing effective feedback processes in higher education, combining theory and practice to equip and empower educators. It places less emphasis on what teachers do in terms of providing commentary, and more emphasis on how students generate, make sense of, and use feedback for ongoing improvement.

Including discussions on promoting student engagement with feedback, technology-enabled feedback, and effective peer feedback, this book:

• Contributes to the theory and practice of feedback in higher education by showcasing new paradigm feedback thinking focused on dialogue and student uptake.
• Synthesises the evidence for effective feedback practice.
• Provides contextualised examples of successful innovative feedback designs analysed in relation to relevant literature.
• Highlights the importance of staff and student feedback literacy in developing productive feedback partnerships.
• Supports higher education teachers in further developing their feedback practice.

Feedback literacy is an important graduate attribute that supports students’ future work capacities. This study aimed to develop a framework through which discipline-specific feedback literacies, as a set of socially situated skills, can be developed within core curricula. The framework is developed through a content analysis of National Qualifications Frameworks from six countries and UK Subject Benchmark Statements for multiple disciplines, analysis of indicative subject content for a range of disciplines and consultation with subject-matter experts. Whilst most of the benchmark statements incorporate the development of feedback literacy skills related to ‘making judgements’, attributes relating to ‘appreciating feedback’ and ‘taking action based on feedback’ are less prevalent. Skills related to ‘managing the affective challenges of feedback’ are most prevalent in documentation for applied disciplines. The resulting empirically guided curriculum design framework showcases how integrating the development of discipline-specific feedback literacies can be enacted through authentic learning activities and assessment tasks. In terms of implications for practice, the framework represents in concrete terms how discipline-specific feedback literacies can be integrated within higher education curricula. The findings also have implications for policy: by positioning discipline-specific feedback literacies as graduate outcomes, we believe they should be integrated within national qualifications frameworks as crucial skills to be developed through higher education courses. Finally, from a theoretical perspective, we advance conceptions of feedback literacy through a sociocultural approach and propose new directions for research that seek to reconceptualise a singular concept of feedback literacy as multiple feedback literacies that unfold in distinctive ways across disciplines.

If feedback is to be conducted effectively, then there needs to be clarity about what is involved and what is necessary for teachers to be able to undertake it well. While much attention has recently been devoted to student feedback literacy, less has been given to what is required of teaching staff in their various roles in feedback processes. This paper seeks to elucidate teacher feedback literacy through an analysis of the accounts of those who do feedback well. An inductive analysis was undertaken of conversations about feedback with 62 university teachers from five Australian universities using a dataset of transcripts of interviews and focus groups from two earlier research studies. Through an iterative process a teacher feedback literacy competency framework was developed which represents the competencies required of university teachers able to design and enact effective feedback processes. The paper discusses the different competencies required of those with different levels of responsibility, from overall course design to commenting on students’ work. It concludes by considering implications for the professional development of university teachers in the area of feedback.