Appreciating feedback

Appreciating feedback refers to both students recognizing the value of feedback and understanding their active role in its processes (Carless & Boud, 2018; Molloy et al., 2020). The understanding of what feedback is, how it works, and what role it requires in the learning process is a key element to move beyond seeing it as input. Therefore, for appreciating feedback, feedback literate students, as pointed out by Carless and Boud (2018) and adopted by Carless and Winstone (2020), a) understand and appreciate the role of feedback in improving work and the active learner role in feedback processes; b) recognize that feedback information comes in different forms and from different sources; and c) use technology to access, store and revisit feedback. As illustrated in the upcoming information, teachers' role in this framework is complementary and helpful to meet the previously mentioned criteria.

Since more attention is needed to be given to writing in order to develop students' writing, learners' understanding of the value of written feedback does not demand looking at feedback as a grade or score given on writing performance but rather as an opportunity for promoting learning. Feedback in this regard requires both teachers and students to supplement each other in the feedback process to achieve a better understanding of each one's role. Learners' appreciation of their active role in the written feedback process (Carless & Boud, 2018; Molloy et al., 2020) is also warranted. It can be achieved either by developing their abilities when trying to seek written feedback from multiple sources (e.g., teachers or peers) or by reflecting on their writing from the comments provided by their instructors or other students (Carless & Boud, 2018). Students can also develop their evaluative judgment in the sense that they can give written feedback on the work of others and at the same time reflect on their own writing performance and the way others could respond to feedback (Tai et al., 2018). In the feedback process, the role of students is not only restricted to receiving feedback, but also to composing it (Cho & Cho, 2011). Therefore, receiving and composing are two important acts that justify the integrative roles students might have when acting as feedback receivers (assesses) and feedback composers (assessors), especially in the reviewing process. The teacher's role in helping students to appreciate their two different roles in the feedback process, especially as feedback assessors can promote their long-term process of learning. Active students in the feedback process are engaged in self-evaluation as well as peer assessment. When learners generate feedback, they benefit more from learning.

Learners' engagement with written feedback from multiple sources (e.g., teachers, peers, online communities, tutoring software, program stimulators, and stimulators) and their use of diverse modes (e.g., audio recording, short and detailed written comments) to communicate feedback would help them understand feedback and work on it to meet their learning needs in different learning environments (Henderson et al., 2019). All these available sources and modes encourage learners to make sense of the information provided. Henderson et al. (2019) highlighted several advantages of technology that can stimulate and support learners learning by providing them with innovative feedback practices. For example, teachers' use of screens, white-boards, and microphones is effective when students are working in groups or studying as a whole class. Teachers' integration of technology in feedback provision provides rich feedback information to students through the use of video feedback (Henderson & Phillips, 2015), and screencast recording (Thompson & Lee, 2012). Therefore, teachers are allowed to focus on more global aspects of students' performance (e.g., argument, analysis, synthesis) rather than on mechanics of writing (e.g., spelling and grammar, syntax). Information given through these media could be richer, more detailed, valuable, personal, and motivating (Henderson & Phillips, 2015).

Making judgments

To make the most of feedback processes, Carless and Boud (2018), supported by Carless and Winstone (2020), emphasized the active role of students in making evaluative judgment. According to them, feedback literate students a) develop capacities to make sound academic judgments about their own work and the work of others; b) participate productively in peer feedback processes; c) and refine self-evaluative capacities over time in order to make more robust judgments.

In the writing context, especially during the writing process, students often engage in self-assessment when they evaluate the quality of their written work. The act of self-evaluation is part of what is now referred to in the literature as evaluative judgment. The latter is defined as “the capability to make decisions about the quality of work of oneself and others” (Tai et al., 2018, p. 471). This definition suggests two actions: assessing one's own work and the work of others. It also involves assessing the work based on assessment criteria such as rubrics or exemplars. These types of assessment are enacted through feedback which can either be written or oral. The first is defined as a process of correcting errors and/or commenting on student writing (Lee, Mak, & Burns, 2015). Written feedback is also conceptualized as teacher's input to a writer's composition in the form of information to be used for revision (Keh, 1990). The second can be defined as communicated information given by an agent about one's performance (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). It can have corrective, evaluative, descriptive, interactional, and motivational role (Irawan & Salija, 2017). As feedback in written mode (written feedback) has frequently received attention in classroom practices, it becomes the focus of this discussion.

The term “Work” in the previously mentioned definition of evaluative judgment is conceptualized in a broader way. It describes any product that learners can do or perform (Boud et al., 2018). However, in the field of writing, work is specific to the written work or writing performance. Therefore, students can not only make evaluative decisions about their own written work, but also, they can contribute to others' written product or text when making sound decisions about the quality of their writing. On the one hand, when students assess their writing, they can involve themselves in self-regulating strategies which enable them to monitor their performance in writing and promote their learning as lifelong learners (Joughin, Boud, & Dawson, 2019). On the other hand, students can reflect on their own written work through their engagement in making sound decisions on others' written work. “Supporting students to make judgments about their own and their peers' work may have more impact on student learning than traditional, transmissive tutor feedback” (McConlogue, 2015, p. 1504). For learners to have effective evaluative judgments, they might rely on writing assessment criteria, rubrics, exemplars, peer review, self-assessment, peer assessment and self-regulated learning (Panadero, 2016; Tai et al., 2018). For students to become self-regulated learners, who are able to set their own goals and monitor or evaluate progress to achieve targeted goals, they need to engage with feedback information they receive either from the teacher or peers (Esterhazy & Damşa, 2019).

Evaluative judgment is a conscious and analytical process in which students can distinguish between what is and what is not a well-written work (Boud et al., 2018). For example, effective learners are able to make sense of their own work and that of others based on their high level of understanding, their ability to use writing assessment criteria, and their ability to make objective decision-making apart from their subjective feelings or personal beliefs (Joughin et al., 2019). To provide quality feedback to peers, learners can use rubrics or written feedback assessment criteria in order to develop their capabilities in evaluative judgment. In literature, there is scant research on the way students make their evaluative judgment on writing performance. What is obvious in higher education institutions is that teachers try to base their judgment on comparisons they make between students and on which they can give a mark (Boud et al., 2018). Thus, there is no or little room for assessing students writing performance against certain writing assessment criteria or standards. The old-fashioned way of judgment could be due to the earlier policy era which is prevalent in traditional approaches to assessment. Escaping this comparison-oriented approach will remain difficult if current classroom practices are still shaped by assessment practices of this kind (Boud et al., 2018). Encouraging students to make their evaluative judgment against sound criteria and not based on the comparison, is recently warranted. A good way to do this is to provide students with the seven standards of textuality, (e.g., cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality, and intertextuality) mentioned by Beaugrande and Dressler (1981/1992), and against which they can judge their own written work and the work of their peers in the feedback and writing process. If students base their writing on these standards, their written text will be communicative. As an illustration of how writers can achieve this communicative purpose, Mikhchi (2011) referred to prerequisite connections between these standards as follows: At the cohesion and coherence level, writers can pay attention to the syntactic and conceptual relationships when they write their text. At the intentionality and acceptability level, writers can connect their attitudes about the text with that of the readers by considering their accepted preferences. At the informativity level, writers can pay attention to the way the written message is conveyed or the way meaning-making is achieved. At the situationality level, writers can take the context/setting into account when writing, and, finally, at the intertextuality level, writers consider the reciprocal relationship of separate texts. All these standards can serve as elements that can help students to make evaluative judgments in the feedback and writing process.

In formative peer assessment, the peer also should be encouraged to construct relevant and useful judgment. Peers have a lot to contribute to the development of others' abilities (Cowan, 2010) such as their writing abilities. With the help of writing assessment criteria, peers can yield sound decisions and critical and constructive evaluative judgments of their own written work and that of others (Tai et al., 2018). As an example of productive practices, students can be encouraged to negotiate the strengths and the weaknesses of their written work with a peer, and this could be done when they are fully engaged with learning and peer-reviewing. In process writing, for example, students are usually involved in exchanging constructive comments, suggestions, and feedback for the sake of improving their written drafts. Students often benefit from these exchanges of feedback with peers both as receivers of judgment and as peer providers of evaluative decisions. In the peer-feedback process, the role of a peer is not only restricted to receiving feedback, but also to constructing feedback. This effective process of taking active roles of peer assessors and of peer-assesses can promote students' long-term process of learning (McConlogue, 2015), for example, learning to write. Cowan (2010) argued that university students, especially in writing assignments, “should make judgments of the quality of their own work as they are drafting. These evaluations may lead in turn to decisions on their part about the adequacy of a draft assignment, or the scope and means to improve aspects of it” (p. 326). Therefore, as Cowan (2010) stated, “Teachers should plan to develop and assess this ability in all students and encourage them to use it and further develop it, in their time in higher education and thereafter” (p. 327).

Managing affect

Carless and Boud (2018), supported by Carless and Winstone (2020), argued that feedback literate students maintain emotional equilibrium and avoid defensiveness when receiving critical feedback; they are proactive in eliciting suggestions from peers or teachers and continuing dialogue with them as needed; and they develop habits of striving for continuous improvement on the basis of internal and external feedback.

To avoid the mismatch that could arise in the feedback process between the teacher and the student, establishing a good relationship is mandatory. This relationship would develop an understanding between the two and therefore would encourage them to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the written work (Yang & Carless, 2013). Feedback is a social practice in which the management of relationships, teacher-student, and student-student relationships can influence positively or negatively students' reactions and emotions and therefore their way of learning (Yang & Carless, 2013). Trust can have a potential factor that affects how students respond to feedback. Based on the results obtained from the open-ended questionnaires and interviews, Chong (2018) found in his study that students' positive relationship with their teachers has resulted in a higher degree of trust towards teachers. This helped students to agree with and accept teacher feedback. “A close relationship between students and teachers helped students to understand the teacher, his way of giving feedback or his ‘style of feedback’; owing to such understanding, there is an increased likelihood that students would agree with teacher feedback” (Chong, 2018, p. 508). Yang and Carless (2013) also argue that an equal power relationship with teachers can also arouse positive emotions, which can enable students to self-regulate their own learning strategies. Whereas an unequal relationship can lead students to lose confidence in responding to teacher feedback and, therefore, act as passive learners who heavily draw on their teachers' guidance. As a remedy, teachers need to respond positively by showing empathy to students when engaging with written feedback and writing assessment (Yang & Carless, 2013).

In Pokorny and Pickford's (2010) study, students indicated the value of teacher-student relationships during the engagement with feedback. To take teacher feedback into consideration, students preferred to have a shared responsibility in feedback rather than receiving one-to-one feedback opportunities with the teacher. Students needed to feel comfortable when receiving feedback. They appreciated if teachers are flexible, not rigid, and always put themselves in the students' shoes. Students needed to be engaged in dialogue with their teachers rather than be engaged in a power distance relationship with them. This would help them feel relaxed to ask for feedback information and express themselves when faced with some writing issues. Students related their engagement with feedback and their high level of confidence to the good feedback relationship with teachers who are supportive, relaxed, approachable, playful, open, and desiring to have feedback conversations. Feedback also needs to be a two-way process between a student and a peer (Pokorny & Pickford, 2010). Encouraging a feedback culture in which both the student and the peer can play pivotal roles as key providers and receivers of feedback is important to create an atmosphere of collaboration and develop the skills of self- and peer-feedback assessment.

Several researchers also argued that technology (audio and video feedback) can strengthen the relational aspects of feedback information exchange (Carless & Winstone, 2020; Espasa, Mayordomo, Guasch, & Martinez-Melo, 2019; Mahoney, Macfarlane, & Ajjawi, 2019; Thomas, West, & Borup, 2017). Video feedback can create a social presence in an online environment to substitute the absence of teacher's interaction and can also support students' need of feedback information in distance learning. For less confident students who are reluctant to engage in face-to-face discussions with the teacher, audio feedback might be a useful tool to respond to student writing and to review their performance at distance and anytime.

Taking action

To act upon feedback, Carless and Boud (2018), supported by Carless and Winstone (2020), emphasized that feedback literate students are aware of their imperative role to take action in response to feedback information. They draw inferences from a range of feedback experiences for the purpose of continuous improvement (Boud & Molloy, 2013a, 2013b), and they develop a repertoire of strategies for acting on feedback.

Feedback literate learners act upon comments that they have received (Sutton, 2012). Molloy et al., (2020) argued that it is not enough for students “to know the importance of being an active player, they need the dispositions and capabilities to put these into practice and an awareness of the complexity of putting these skills together in context” (p. 532). Students are required to respond to feedback information from the teacher and peers through goal-setting and planning how it might be utilized in improving future performance (Molloy et al., 2020). This information could be analyzed and recorded in appropriate forms for the purposes of acting on it subsequently (Molloy et al., 2020).

Peer review in the drafting process of writing is one way to engage students with written feedback and a better alternative to the criticized approach of teacher feedback. Through peer review, students are active participants in both the receipt and the production of feedback reviews (Nicol, 2019; Nicol, Thomson, & Breslin, 2014); hence, their learning due to this peer review can be enhanced without relying on the teacher to tell them what is right and wrong in their writing (Sadler, 2010). McConlogue (2015) has proved that teacher feedback does not support students learning in the same way peer feedback does. Despite the effort teachers make to help their students' progress in their learning, several studies indicated the dissatisfaction of students with teacher feedback (Carless, 2006; Mulliner & Tucker, 2017; Nicol, 2010), which most of the time was non-understandable, confusing, and non-helpful (Dowden, Pittaway, Yost, & Mccarthy, 2013). Therefore, it is important to consider the positive impact and the benefits that peer revision/reviewing could have on students' performance, for example, in writing.

The merits of receiving feedback reviews from peers have been acknowledged in the literature. At its best, feedback from peers is more accessible and understandable for learners than teacher feedback (Falchikov, 2005; Topping, 1998). Learners can benefit from varied amounts of feedback information due to the involvement of multiple peers in responding to their writing (Topping, 1998). The more feedback students receive from multiple peers, the more chances they will have to improve the quality of their writing (Cho & MacArthur, 2010). Feedback received from diverse peers is more useful than feedback received from one peer or one teacher (Cho & Schunn, 2007). Unlike teacher feedback, peer feedback from multiple peers can target general features of writing rather than focusing on one or two specific features (Cho & MacArthur, 2010). Receiving feedback reviews from many peers gives students the opportunity to look at the text through the eyes of different readers (Cho & MacArthur, 2010; Holliway & McCutchen, 2004). They will understand that feedback provision could be interpreted and provided differently by different readers (Cho, Cho, & Hacker, 2010).

Compared to the aforementioned studies and some other studies on the benefits of receiving feedback from peers, there is scant research on the learning benefits of constructing feedback for peers. In an experimental study carried out by Cho and MacArthur (2011), the findings demonstrated that students who rated and commented on their peers' written papers wrote higher quality papers than students who read their peers' written work or who read materials not related to the given topic. The researchers argued that their controlled study “provides support for peer review of writing as a learning activity” (p. 73), which encourages students to be active feedback providers by producing feedback reviews for their peers. Based on another study that proves the productivity of giving feedback comments to peers in the revision process of writing, Cho and Cho (2011) investigated the effects of the provision and the reception of feedback comments on undergraduate students' laboratory reports. They found that improvement in writing arises more significantly when students give written feedback comments to their peers rather than when they receive them. Studies revolving around the merits of receiving and constructing feedback reviews could be "more informative about what students learn from reviewing rather than how they learn" (Nicol et al., 2014, pp. 104–105).

Drawing on their own studies, Cho and MacArthur (2010) and Cho and Cho (2011) proposed actually a number of relevant learning implications for students' engagement in the reviewing process. The first one pertains to learners' opportunity in analyzing the text through the eyes of the reader. This helps them not only understand that readers might have different interpretations of the produced text (Cho et al., 2010), but also helps them develop the way they plan, monitor, and improve their writing. The second implication relates to the development of learners' skills in the writing process (e.g., self-editing, self-evaluation, and problem-solving). Students read, analyze, edit, evaluate, and fix problems related to their own writing. All these cognitive processes are effective in composing a final quality draft. The third implication concerns the student's ability in understanding the good criteria that make others' work effective or non-effective.

In acting upon written feedback, feedback literate students monitor their own progress in writing to indicate where feedback might be helpful and to influence the setting of new learning goals (Molloy et al., 2020). In order for learners to utilize process-based written feedback and develop their self-regulated learning, learners can engage in three processes suggested by Sadler (1989, p. 121): (a) developing a concept of the goal/standard or reference level being aimed for (the need to provide dialogue around assessment criteria through which to share tacit expectations), (b) comparing the actual (or current) level of performance with that goal or standard (c), and engaging in appropriate action which leads to some kind of closure of the gap.