Understanding and Improving Learners’ Feedback Seeking Behavior

Abstract

Feedback in education is predominantly a teacher initiated practice. Even when peers exchange feedback, it is the teacher who initiates and manages it. The same is reflected in the design of online learning environments. But this idea is incompatible with the real world challenges, where individuals are often required to proactively elicit and judge feedback from multiple sources for accomplishing their goals. Interventions to nurture such learner agency in feedback seeking are rare. My study investigates learners’ proactive feedback seeking behavior during a chemistry representational task. Using microgenetic analysis, I examine how the factors related to the learner, task, feedback sources and the tools influence the learners’ feedback seeking behavior. In the preliminary findings, I describe how these factors interact in determining the variables such as timing, purpose, choice of feedback source, mode of seeking and using the feedback received. Ultimately, my thesis objective is to arrive at guidelines that can inform the design of learning environments to better facilitate and improve learners’ feedback seeking behavior.