Connecting teacher and student assessment literacy with self-evaluation and peer feedback

Abstract

Teachers’ feedback literacy is a focus of increasing attention in higher education. It may be framed through intentional design decisions, inter-relational aspects of engagement and pragmatic considerations of enacted curricula. Thus, teachers’ feedback literacy is connected to both the enacted curriculum and students’ relationship to feedback. How these connections take shape in particular approaches to the curriculum, affecting students’ roles in feedback and evaluation is not as well-understood. This paper presents findings from an intervention aimed at developing students’ peer feedback and self-evaluation skills in an undergraduate business course. Peer feedback and self-evaluation are increasingly common modes of engaging students as active participants in feedback and evaluation processes. It is therefore worthwhile to understand the ways in which these processes affect and link teacher and student feedback literacy. Data was analysed from a 14-week course aimed at developing students’ competencies in self-evaluation, peer feedback and teamwork. Results are presented and discussed according to three major areas: how teacher’s feedback on student engagement with feedback served as affective ‘meta’ scaffolding, the trajectory of students’ growth in feedback literate self-evaluation, and the relationship of feedback literacy to trajectory of growth in teamwork competencies. The paper concludes with suggestions for further, crossdisciplinarity research.