Positioning relational feed-forward as a caring pedagogy to enhance students’ affective responses to assessment

Hill, Jennifer; West, Harry

Abstract

Receiving assessment feedback is inherently emotional for students. As such, instructors need to consider how to manage students’ responses to feedback so that they feel capable of improving their work and maintaining their wellbeing. In this presentation, we examine the emotional responses of undergraduate geography students to written assessment feedback and the role that instructor-student relational feed-forward can play in foregrounding student emotion, dissipating anxiety, and enabling productive learning attitudes and behaviours. We combine results from two qualitative projects running over the academic years 2015-2018 and 2019-2020. We thematically analysed semi-structured interviews and focus groups with students who experienced dialogic feed-forward on a single module in a British university. Our results demonstrate that many students struggled to receive and act upon negative feedback, carrying it as a burden, and associating it with a sense of personal failure. Positive feedback, by contrast, evoked intense but fleeting emotions, validating self-worth and increasing confidence. Relational feed-forward helped students to manage their emotions. Importantly, negative emotions arising from feedback did not dwell with these students as they had done previously with respect to written instructor commentary. Rather, relational feed-forward helped the students to feel positive about their work in real time, divorcing it from definitive comments about themselves. Our findings suggest that the relationship with the instructor is very important in encouraging students to seek wider support for their learning. We conclude by exploring academic strategies that purposely position relational instructor feed-forward as an act of care across the curriculum.

Citation

Hill, J., & West, H. (2022, August). Positioning relational feed-forward as a caring pedagogy to enhance students’ affective responses to assessment. Presented at Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference (RGS-IBG Annual International Conference), Newcastle

• Presentation Conference Type: Speech
• Conference Name: Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference (RGS-IBG Annual International Conference)
• Conference Location: Newcastle
• Start Date: Aug 30, 2022
• End Date: Sep 2, 2022
• Deposit Date: Sep 5, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 7, 2022
• Keywords: Assessments, caring pedagogy
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9949756
• Related Public URLs: https://www.rgs.org/research/annual-international-conference/