An Ethnographic Investigation into Student Engagement With Teacher Written Feedback

Abstract

In recent years, growing research attention has been aimed at student engagement with teacher written feedback. Researchers (e.g., Carless, 2022) have found that previous research ignored students’ role in the feedback practice, in theory because researchers previously restricted their understanding of student engagement with feedback to a popular three-factor categorisation, i.e., behavioural, cognitive, and affective (Fredrick et al., 2004). In order to move beyond this rather constrictive way of considering student engagement, the present study seeks to build a holistic picture of student engagement with teacher written feedback by examining students’ lived feedback experiences. To achieve this goal, social constructivism (Hirtle, 1996) has been employed to frame teacher written feedback as a dialogic meaning-making process between the teacher and the student. In line with this conceptual framework, online ethnography was adopted to guide the collection and analysis of data.
Eight Chinese university students were recruited to participate in the research. They provided multiple sources of data, including observational data, audio-recordings of feedback dialogue, self-reports, and semi-structured interviews. As a result of an ongoing iterative thematic analysis, five preliminary themes have been generated, including paying attention to feedback, tackling feedback, utilising feedback, resorting to resources, and minimal action. The analysis of these themes illustrates a dynamic interrelationship between students’ diverse forms of engagement, with potential mediating factors explained. This presentation will focus on one of the themes, tackling feedback, to show one aspect of student engagement in teacher feedback. Overall, the findings of the current study should theoretically contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex nature of student engagement with teacher written feedback. Pedagogically, the study aims to provide suggestions for activating students’ role in the feedback process to enhance teachers’ written feedback practices.