Teachers’ Feedback: Exploring Differences in Students’ Perceptions

Abstract

Perception plays a key-role in how feedback is processed. Individual and situational characteristics can potentially influence how students perceive teachers’ feedback. Our main goal is to study if students’ gender and/or the type of education program they attend may influence how they perceive teacher feedback in a class that they like. For this study we used 13 items from the Feedback, Identification, School Trajectories Questionnaire that measure students’ perceptions about teachers’ effective feedback (EF) and ineffective feedback (IF). Data from 178 students were randomly selected from a larger data base (89 attending the 9th grade of an academic education program and 89 attending courses in vocational education). No differences were found in the perceived feedback regarding a main effect of the type of education program attended, neither for the combined effect of type of education program attended and the student gender. However, results revealed a student gender main effect, with girls perceiving more effective feedback than boys. Future studies should continue exploring how learners’ individual and situational characteristics may relate or affect their feedback perceptions, as well as how these perceptions relate to learning. This will allow us to compare results and fully grasp the practical significance of the magnitude of the effects found.