Skip to content Skip to footer

Chinese Language Feedback Pedagogy

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.

Results and artefacts from stage 5&6
 

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!

 

For reflection form part 2 (see above), we asked students to reflect on the feedback given to them. Zooming in to question 1 and 3, we asked students which feedback was most helpful to them and why. Student answered that he understood that he needed to use a news article as an example. This was because he did not know where to include these examples. Next, we asked him, based on the feedback given by the teacher, which part of the essay can be improved? What are the methods to improve? Student answered that he could elaborate further with examples from the news article. From this reflection, we can tell that the student was able to explain the enhancement made in the subsequent task.
 
Summary
 
Our feedback research project took place over three months, and we had the opportunity to use the interactive feedback cover sheet to engage our students in a feedback dialogue affectively, behaviourally, and cognitively. This can be summarized in the following table: 
 

 

Affection: Reflection helps students to better understand feedback given, hence more neutral feelings towards it, this can help students to be more open-minded and receptive towards feedback. For example, one of the students told us that he felt less anxious and angry after the reflection as he understood the intentions of the feedback and how to improve on his work.
Behavior: Students treated the feedback seriously and demonstrated their understanding and were able to apply in subsequent tasks. This gave us confidence that our feedback advice to students were interpreted by them as actionable, and that they were motivated to act on the feedback.
Cognitive: Upon reflection, students were able to understand what the additional ingredient is to improve their work. This provided greater clarity of the cognitive pitching of our feedback in addressing their learning gaps. For example, in the argumentative essay writing, one of the students reflected that he could do better in elaborating his points. This helps teacher to provide targeted feedback by guiding the student on the effective use of news articles and statistics to finetune his essay.
Conclusion
 
In this project, we had learnt that instead of focusing on students’ errors, we can help students to reflect on their errors. This will subsequently help students to be more open-minded and receptive towards feedback, treat the feedback seriously and take the necessary actions to bridge their learning gaps. It would be ideal if they can transfer the learning to subsequent tasks and progressively learn how to close their gaps independently. Spurred by the encouraging response from our students and the improvement in their learning, our team is motivated to continue our efforts to improve our feedback practices even more.