Making Feedback Constructive: The Interplay of Undergraduates' Mastery Goal Orientation With Feedback Specificity and Friendliness

• In Event: Feedback to the Future: Impacts of a Venerable Construct on 21st-Century Motivation and Learning

Abstract

Decades of research have supported the nearly axiomatic principles of providing formative feedback to students: be specific, timely, and process-focused (Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Kamins & Dweck, 1999; Shute, 2008). However, systematic student-based evaluations of feedback statements are limited, frequently based on focus groups and student opinions to elicit preferred feedback characteristics. Using feedback as the unit of analysis, our study examined the role of feedback elements, namely specificity and friendliness, on students’ perceptions of the statements’ constructive nature. In addition, we assessed whether views of constructive feedback differed for students with high or low mastery goals.

Teachers often encounter difficulty when providing feedback to students, in choosing words that simultaneously motivate and instruct (Sansone, Sachau, & Weir, 1989), what we would call constructive feedback. Providing constructive feedback is complex due to the interplay of emotional and motivational processes students experience when receiving such feedback: for example, a threat to their sense of competence, a lack of motivation to re-engage in the task, or possibly increased determination to try harder in the future (Dujinhouwer, Prins, & Stokking, 2012). Therefore, we sought to determine the most important elements that constitute constructive feedback and to uncover how these were perceived by students with different motivational orientations.

In Phase 1, 50 college students from a subject pool were asked to imagine receiving feedback on a paper they wrote for a college course. Next, they rated 60 feedback statements on specificity and friendliness (its positivity and politeness). We crafted feedback statements to create a diverse set of feedback examples varying in specificity and friendliness. In Phase 2, 29 college students, also from a subject pool, rated the feedback statements in Phase 1 on levels of constructiveness and completed the Achievement Goal Orientation questionnaire (Elliot & Church, 1997).

Using multiple regression, we examined the degree to which ratings of specificity, friendliness, and their interaction predicted levels of constructiveness. We also controlled for statement word count to account for students’ tendency to assume longer statements to reflect greater constructiveness. Results indicated that specificity (β=2.07), friendliness (β=1.43), and their interaction (β=-1.79) significantly predicted constructiveness. Statements that were specific and friendly were associated with higher ratings of constructiveness. These main effects were qualified by an interaction effect indicating that friendly statements were perceived as more constructive when feedback statements were unspecific. When statements were highly specific, the friendlier statements were perceived as less constructive. In addition, we found that students high in mastery goals perceived statements high in specificity as more constructive regardless of friendliness compared to students low in mastery goals (friendly, F(1,27)=8.39, p=.007; unfriendly, F(1,27)=5.97, p=.021). This finding aligns with goal orientation theory (Dweck & Leggett, 1988): mastery-oriented students may prefer specific feedback to learn from and improve.

This study extends the literature on feedback by examining the interplay of its constitutive elements on student perceptions of constructiveness, adding the influence of individual motivational differences to explore its theoretical essence. Implications obtain for how instructors can deliver feedback in effective and motivationally-supportive ways.

Authors

• Carlton Jing Fong, The University of Texas - Austin

• Diane L. Schallert, The University of Texas - Austin

• Kyle M. Williams, The University of Texas at Austin

• Zachary H. Williamson, The University of Texas - Austin

• Shengjie Lin, The University of Texas - Austin

• Ling-Hui Chen, Saint Edward's University

• Youngwon Kim, The University of Texas - Austin