Feeling feedback: students’ emotional responses to educator feedback

By Tracii Ryan, Michael Henderson. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 2017

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Assessment feedback allows students to obtain valuable information about how they can improve their future performance and learning strategies. However, research indicates that students are more likely to reject or ignore comments if they evoke negative emotional responses. Despite the importance of this issue, there is a lack of research exploring if certain types of students are more likely to experience negative emotional responses than others. This study builds on extant qualitative studies through a quantitative examination of two previously identified student variables: different citizenship backgrounds (domestic and international) and different grade expectations (higher or lower than expected). The participants were 4514 students from two Australian universities. Analysis of survey data revealed that, regardless of language experience, international students were more likely than domestic students to find feedback comments to be discouraging, upsetting and too critical. Students who received grades lower than they expected on a particular assessment task were more likely than students who received grades higher than they expected to feel sad, shameful and angry as a result of the feedback comments. This paper concludes with several recommendations, including the need to modify assessment feedback practices in order to be sensitive to different student cohorts.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4fcde9126598881035d906b588df305df54ed85e

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Citations in the corpus

From feedback to revisions: Effects of feedback features and perceptions (2020, background): “Students are more likely to ignore comments if they trigger negative emotions (Ryan & Henderson, 2017).”
Building Feedback Literacy: Students’ Perceptions of the Developing Engagement With Feedback Toolkit (2019, background): “Beyond these possible reasons, we should also recognize that there is an affective dimension to receiving feedback: the “emotional backwash” that people often experience in response to feedback can inhibit their cognitive processing of the developmental information (Pitt, 2017; Pitt and Norton, 2017”
The challenges of feedback in higher education (2019, background): “In addition, other feedback research has pointed to issues relating to individual attitudes and capabilities, such as motivation (Rowe et al. 2014), empathy (Crossman 2007; Carless 2013), and emotional resilience (Ryan and Henderson 2018).”