Rethinking feedback for student’ affective, behavioural, and cognitive engagement with interactive feedback cover sheets
by Lee Cheng Yen
Sook Chiun Kew
Chong Pey Yi
(Riverside Secondary School)
Introduction
It is not unusual for feedback for Chinese essay writing to centre on students correcting their mistakes. Students would copy the corrections blindly without realizing their gaps, and they did not treat the feedback given seriously. Thus, they were unable to recall what they had corrected, and tended to repeat similar mistakes. Hence, completing corrections did not translate into actual learning. As a result, we could observe some students losing motivation after receiving feedback over time. And we also wanted students to address their learning gaps beyond correcting their mistakes.
This prompted us to search and read assessment literature to address the situation. We understood that “The only way to tell if learning results from feedback is for students to make some kind of response to complete the feedback loop” (Sadler, 1989, p.121). If students are to benefit from teacher comments, they must deliberately reflect on and process them, and have opportunities to apply what they have learnt from the feedback to subsequent tasks (Boud and Molloy 2013; Evans 2013; Nicol 2013). Engagement with feedback involves receiving, perceiving, interpreting and understanding it, and using it in some way to improve learning (Handley et al., 2011;Hargreaves, 2011;Nicol, 2013). Lastly, feedback evokes achievement emotions in students. Emotions are a key component of self-regulation (Pekrun et al., 2002), and developing learners’ self-regulation in responding to strong feelings evoked by feedback is an important area of focus.
Formulation of objectives
With the above readings in mind, we formulated the following as the problem statement “After feedback is given, students did not find it important to address the learning gaps or feel motivated to act on the feedback. They tended to copy corrections blindly without realising their gaps and did not treat the feedback given seriously, they tended to lose motivation after receiving feedback” for our assessment feedback pedagogy research project in 2021 in three Chinese Language classes. This project offers concrete ways for students to remain motivated to bridge their learning gaps through using a teacher feedback as a form of introspection and engaging in reflective practices and applying teachers’ specific feedback in subsequent tasks. We hope to achieve the outcomes in three domains:
Affective: Students to have positive feeling towards teachers’ feedback.
Behavioral: Students are able to understand and apply the feedback given.
Cognitive: Students are able to show improvement in subsequent task.
We have identified three classes: Sec 3 Higher Chinese, Sec 3 Express and Sec 2 Express as our target group.
These were the stages of our action research:
Stage 1: We started our implementation with a baseline survey for students to rate their emotions on a 5-point likert scale when they receive feedback from their teacher on their writing. The information from the survey was useful for us to find out how students perceive feedback.
Stage 2: However, some of the survey responses were unexpected and puzzling. For example, students informed us that they feel anger and hopelessness when teacher provides feedback. Hence, we gave our students an essay assignment with an evaluation form to clarify why the students responded in this manner.
Stage 3: The assignment evaluation form which students submitted after they had completed their essays served as a feedback cover sheet.
There are 2 parts to the feedback cover sheet:
The first part is a self-checklist with task success criteria to see their self-assessing capability, also to be aware of their learning gap, while the second part is where students request for feedback on their essay. When teachers are aware of what students want to know, they will be better able to customise the feedback provided to meet students’ interests and needs. The written feedback can better prompt learners to think back on and think about their learning and what can be improved.
Stage 4: We analysed students’ requests and provided targeted feedback in order to optimize students engagement with teacher feedback in the affective, behavioural, and cognitive dimensions.
Stage 5 & 6: After the feedback is given by teachers, students are required to complete the reflection form and complete their corrections.
The purpose of the reflection form is to allow students to see if teachers have provided feedback based on what they have requested, and students are able to understand the feedback given by the teacher, then demonstrate the understanding in subsequent tasks. We designed the worksheet with the aim of promoting of promoting a 2-way conversation between students and teachers. Hence, dialogue boxes were deliberately incorporated to prompt students to pen down their thoughts.
Stage 7: The last implementation step in this project is the post feedback survey which has similar questions as the baseline survey.
We looked at how students responded to the teacher’s feedback. On the left, is the student’s original essay. The teacher commented that the student should give examples by providing evidence from news articles. On the right, the same student added in evidence from a news article in his correction. From this, we think that students did understand and made use of the feedback to apply in their subsequent task.
Above is a sample of part 1 of a student’s reflection form after students received their marked essay with feedback given to them. We asked the student, “Did the teacher respond to your request?” Student acknowledged that the teacher responded and required him to use the examples from the news article. This assured us that students were reading and acting on our feedback!
