Key capabilities for promoting student feedback literacy

Abstract

Abstract Feedback literacy in higher education has come as a reaction to the ineffective focus on teacher's delivery of feedback and its passive reception by students rather than on students' active participation in receiving feedback and constructing it (Nicol & Macfarlane-dick, 2006; Nicol, 2019). Therefore, the aim of this theoretical paper is to identify students' capabilities of feedback literacy. To meet this objective, three questions are targeted: 1) How is feedback literacy defined? 2) How is it characterized? 3) What are its practical dimensions from student's perspective? Based on the analysis of theoretical and empirical studies retrieved via reliable databases, a thorough description of the existing definitions of feedback literacy and its frameworks (Carless & Boud, 2018; Carless & Winstone, 2020; Molloy, Boud, & Henderson, 2020; Sutton, 2012) can be highlighted. Four dimensions of student feedback literacy and their adaptation to the writing context are also targeted: appreciating feedback, making evaluative judgments, managing affect, and acting upon feedback (Carless & Boud, 2018). This paper is relevant because it addresses the shift from feedback as a one-way process of transmitting information from instructors to feedback as a process of using diverse communication channels, through which teachers and students collaborate to improve learning outcomes.