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Feedback literacy: a critical review of an emerging concept

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Abstract

Systemic challenges for feedback practice are widely discussed in the research literature. The expanding mass higher education systems, for instance, seem to inhibit regular and sustained teacher-student interactions. The concept of feedback literacy, representing students’ and teachers’ capacities to optimize the benefits of feedback opportunities, has gained widespread attention by offering new ways of tackling these challenges. This study involves a critical review of the first 49 published articles on feedback literacy. Drawing on science and technology studies, and in particular on Popkewitz’s concept of fabrication, we explore how research has invented feedback literacy as a way of reframing feedback processes through the idea of individual skill development. First, we analyze how research has fabricated students and teachers through their feedback literacies that can be tracked, measured, and developed. Here, there exists a conceptual shift from analyzing feedback as external input to feedback literacy as a psychological construct residing within individuals. This interpretation carries positive implications of student and teacher empowerment, whilst downplaying policy-level challenges facing feedback interactions. The second contrasting fabrication positions feedback literate students and teachers as socio-culturally situated, communal agents. We conclude that feedback literacy is a powerful idea that, if used carefully, carries potential for reimagining feedback in higher education. It also, however, risks psychologizing students’ and teachers’ feedback behaviors amidst prevalent assessment and grading policies. We call for further reflexivity in considering whether feedback literacy research aims to challenge or complement the broader socio-political landscapes of higher education.

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The studies in our review are marked with an asterisk (*).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Karen Gravett and Dr. Zi Yan for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Their feedback literacies were vital for sharpening our argumentation.

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  1. Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR, China

    Juuso Henrik Nieminen & David Carless

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Nieminen, J.H., Carless, D. Feedback literacy: a critical review of an emerging concept. High Educ 85, 1381–1400 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00895-9

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