Feedback Literacy: a catalyst for lifelong learning from a chemistry education perspective

Abstract

‘Feedback’ is ubiquitous in life! Most people are constantly engaged in processes of generating or receiving different forms of feedback daily, across diverse facets of our lives. Whether we are being invited to complete an online poll after some form of interaction with a service provider; or seeking affirmation through social media; or simply thinking about our own thinking, these activities involve different forms of feedback process. In this editorial, I am exploring a topic that is deeply relevant to my own values and beliefs as a teacher in how best to support student learning in chemistry through feedback processes. I share recent education research that has moved the position of feedback from one of teacher-centric information transfer to one of learner-centric active learning based on developing feedback literacy. In reflecting on this position, I recognise that chemistry education research is ideally placed to build students' capacity in feedback literacy. Our community can capture and share further empirical evidence of strategies that effectively engage students in seeking, processing and acting on feedback as part of chemistry learning.

Introduction

As the focus for my final Editorial as Editor-in-Chief of Chemistry Education Research & Practice (CERP), I am taking the opportunity to explore something that is close to my teaching and research ‘heart’. Feedback is inherently linked to assessment of student learning – this relationship could be compared to how the process of oxidation is coupled to reduction as a chemistry analogy! While assessment has been subject to extensive scrutiny, involving benchmarking and standardisation by institutions, the extent and nature of feedback provision (beyond the supply of a formal grade) typically remains within the domain of the teacher. Without any formal development of students’ skills in how to recognise feedback and apply processes of acting on different forms of feedback, it should come as no surprise that grades and worked solutions as verification are the highest valued form of feedback by students (Shute, 2008). This bias towards verification feedback has emerged in my own research experiences (Lawrie, 2023). In practice, teachers will have provided students with multiple forms of feedback throughout their school experiences but this feedback was not necessarily made explicit. In recent years, recognised leaders in feedback research have argued for new student-centric frameworks that can assist educators to develop feedback literacy capacity and self-assessment skills in their students. I am placing a spotlight on these perspectives in this Editorial to encourage our chemistry education community to build further practices that contribute to the overall process of life-long learning (Fig. 1) through research and practice.

Fig. 1 A representation of the potential impact of developing feedback literacy and self-assessment skills, initiated within school contexts, across multiple trajectories as part of lifelong learning.

Feedback: an interactive process informed by social-constructivist theory

Researchers and teachers have constantly regarded the provision of effective feedback as the foundation of the processes that support development of self-regulated learning by students (this body of research is too extensive to cite here). Despite multiple approaches that have been promoted as engaging students with different forms of feedback, there is substantial evidence that students only value corrective or verification feedback, particularly once they have transitioned to higher education (Sadler, 2014). Students seek and value access to correct answers and worked solutions, this being a legacy of the historical focus on behaviourism in educational systems (Sadler, 2014; Boud and Molloy, 2012).

Indeed, the way both researchers and educators think about feedback has shifted in the past decade from teacher-centric to learner-centric practices in alignment with the increased focus on active learning environments (Carless, 2022). Carless and Boud (2018, p. 1316) define feedback literacy as ‘the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies’. This position places the focus on both teachers and student peers as providers of feedback; however, information provision alone is insufficient to promote learning gains. Self-assessment involving students generating their own internal feedback is recognised as a central element in developing feedback literacy (Malecka et al., 2020; Nicol, 2021).

As students transition into higher education, their most recent experiences of feedback probably involved high-stakes assessment that is designed to rank them for university entrance; therefore verification feedback is likely to have dominated their preparation for exams. There is no doubt that they will have experienced ongoing dialogic formative feedback elicited through interactions with their teachers and peers in small-class settings in high school. On this basis, tertiary educators have opportunity to further develop student capacity in feedback literacy and their self-assessment skills in order to promote self-regulative habits and learner autonomy. Effective learner-centric feedback practices are coupled with teacher feedback literacy, particularly involving approaches that focus on formative feedback, however many teachers regard these approaches as difficult to manage (Carless and Winstone, 2023). Formative assessment and feedback has received less attention in higher education, a recent literature review identified only 28 evidence-based examples of empirical research involving formative assessment and feedback in higher education contexts between 2010–2019 (Morris et al., 2021).

A further exploration of approaches that embed feedback literacy in chemistry education

As a discipline, chemistry inherently involves thinking across multiple levels and relies on the use of internal mental models typically constructed through learning with combinations of external representations. A well-known chemistry discipline example of where only providing the correct answer as feedback is not likely to be effective is in response to students' alternate conceptions. These conceptions are based on tacit knowledge, therefore corrective feedback is unlikely, in itself, to shift the degree of commitment that a student has to their alternative way of thinking; a process of conceptual change is required as an intervention (Taber, 2019).

There are many examples of recently published chemistry education research that explore how students can be engaged with the process of applying feedback. A few studies are shared below to illustrate different approaches.

Modelling and models as feedback

Chemistry educators and teachers engage in a range of disciplinary feedback approaches in their classroom practice that align with developing feedback literacy and self-assessment skills. Chemistry teachers frequently use modelling and models as the basis of feedback to encourage students to self-assess their internal mental models (Justi and Gilbert, 2002). Indeed, using models in the feedback process can also promote the development of representational competence (Padalkar and Hegarty, 2015).

Designing resources for self-assessment

The process of engaging students in making internal evaluative judgements supports the development of feedback literacy through comparison with external information as part of self- and co-regulation of learning (Nicol, 2021). Feedback rubrics that build in self-assessment offer a novel approach to supporting the development of feedback literacy in chemistry learning. In one study, organic chemistry students demonstrated greater awareness of process skills such as information processing, critical thinking, communication, and team-work through process-oriented guided inquiry activities (Czajka et al., 2021). Another approach that has been demonstrated as effectively supporting chemistry students to develop their self-assessment skills involved the provision of simulated peer feedback as a source of external information. The authors explored how students evaluated their own work and whether this initiated a process of self-improvement (Berg and Moon, 2022). A further study (Tashiro et al., 2021) reported the development of a self-assessment of understanding instrument used by students before, during and after a collaborative task in a general chemistry course. The authors explored how classroom factors influenced students' comparison of their own understanding with that of their peers and how the self-assessment process could support the metacognitive skill of monitoring.

Peer feedback

Peer-led groupwork activities support the social interactions that enable the process and provision of dialogic feedback, in dialogic feedback, a recognised effective approach to promoting students’ skills in chemistry disciplinary discourse (Repice et al., 2016). Encouraging student talk during learning activities, particularly as part of problem-solving, develops their use of chemistry language and their representational competence. It provides another opportunity for self-assessment as part of internal feedback. The process of formal peer review is an important component of developing students' evaluative judgement skills. A structured approach to engaging students with feedback through peer and self-assessment during project-based practicals (Bertram and Thomas, 2023) aligns with the development of professional feedback skills that chemistry researchers value.

Feedback literacy as part of the process of research publication

In Fig. 1, I have recognised ‘publishing’ as a point on the trajectory for lifelong learning linked to teaching and research to emphasise an extension of feedback literacy into this context. While it might be argued that publication of research might be a niche in terms of lifelong learning, the steps of eliciting, processing and acting on feedback draw on the same principles as discussed above. Applying the ‘meta-lens’ of feedback literacy, the role and responsibility of editors in CERP includes facilitating constructive peer feedback for authors to support them in enhancing their communication of their work. However, not dissimilar to the affective response that many students experience on receiving feedback (Carless and Boud, 2018), authors do no always perceive reviewers' feedback as part of a constructive process that can improve their published article. Indeed, an undercurrent culture sometimes emerges involving a mindset of ‘if I address most of the reviewer feedback, then I can ignore other aspects that I don’t want to change’. Perhaps the shift in how we view the development of feedback literacy in our students can translate into their positive engagement with writing and receiving reviews as part of a constructive process for authors.

In summary, CERP offers an ideal audience for the sharing of effective feedback interventions and evidence-based strategies embedded in chemistry education research across all sectors (primary, secondary and tertiary). I look forward to reading these articles for inspiration on how chemistry educators can support lifelong learning through feedback literacy and self-assessment.

References

1. Bertram A. and Tomas C., (2023), Evaluative judgement–a practitioner's case in chemistry research projects, Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 24(1), 312–326.
2. Berg S. A. and Moon A., (2022), Prompting hypothetical social comparisons to support chemistry students’ data analysis and interpretations, Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 23(1), 124–136.
3. Boud D. and Molloy E., (2012), What is the problem with feedback? In Feedback in higher and professional education, Routledge, pp. 1–10.
4. Carless D. and Boud D., (2018), The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback, Assess. Eval. High. Educ., 43(8), 1315–1325.
5. Carless D., (2022), From teacher transmission of information to student feedback literacy: Activating the learner role in feedback processes, Act. Learn. High. Educ., 23(2), 143–153.
6. Carless D. and Winstone N., (2023), Teacher feedback literacy and its interplay with student feedback literacy, Teach. High. Educ., 28(1), 150–163.
7. Czajka D., Reynders G., Stanford C., Cole R., Lantz J. and Ruder S., (2021), A novel rubric format for providing feedback on process skills to STEM undergraduate students, J. Coll. Sci. Teach., 50(6), 48–56.
8. Justi R. and Gilbert J., (2002), Models and modelling in chemical education, Chemical education: Towards research-based practice, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 47–68.
9. Lawrie G. A., (2023), Embedding feedback in digital learning environments to promote learners’ thinking about their thinking in chemistry, in Advances in Chemistry Education Series. No 11.: Digital Learning and Teaching in Chemistry, ed. Y. J. Dori, C. Ngai and G. Szteinberg, Royal Society of Chemistry Publishing, ch. 11.
10. Malecka B., Boud D., and Carless D., (2020), Eliciting, Processing and Enacting Feedback: Mechanisms for Embedding Student Feedback Literacy within the Curriculum, Teach. High. Educ. DOI:10.1080/13562517.2020.1754784.
11. Morris R., Perry T. and Wardle L., (2021), Formative assessment and feedback for learning in higher education: A systematic review, Rev. Educ., 9(3), e3292.
12. Nicol D., (2021), The power of internal feedback: exploiting natural comparison processes, Assess. Eval. High. Educ., 46(5) 756–778.
13. Padalkar S. and Hegarty M., (2015), Models as feedback: Developing representational competence in chemistry, J. Educ. Psychol., 107(2), 451.
14. Repice M. D., Sawyer R. K., Hogrebe M. C., Brown P. L., Luesse S. B., Gealy D. J. and Frey R. F., (2016), Talking through the problems: A study of discourse in peer-led small groups, Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 17(3), 555–568.
15. Sadler D. R., (2014), Beyond feedback: Developing student capability in complex appraisal, Approaches to assessment that enhance learning in higher education, Routledge, pp. 45–60.
16. Shute V. J., (2008), Focus on formative feedback, Rev. Educ. Res., 78(1), 153–189.
17. Taber K. S., (2019), Alternative conceptions and the learning of chemistry, Isr. J. Chem., 59(6–7), 450–469.
18. Tashiro J., Parga D., Pollard J. and Talanquer V., (2021), Characterizing change in students' self-assessments of understanding when engaged in instructional activities, Chem. Educ. Res. Pract., 22(3), 662–682.

---