Using a self-reflective ePortfolio and feedback dialogue to understand and address problematic feedback expectations

Abstract

To maximise the feedback effect, it is crucial to establish a dialogic feedback process between students and teachers. This can facilitate a mutually reinforcing cycle on each other’s feedback practice and uncover unrealistic feedback expectations. In this article, we present a co-developed reflective ePortfolio platform designed to foster students’ self-reflection, facilitate dialogic feedback processes and change the departmental feedback culture. Our findings suggest that incorporating the reflective ePortfolio and dialogic feedback processes enhanced students’ feedback literacy, and promoted greater transparency for raising teacher awareness of local feedback practices. Students appeared to have invested more in their feedback literacy development than their teachers. We also identified expectation-related barriers which include students’ persistence of performance-oriented goals, closely linked to expectations of feedback quality, and the need for teachers to articulate, and for students to make, pedagogic and epistemic transitions. To diminish ongoing barriers, students and teachers have much to learn from each other and increased agency for both parties may be an outcome of these interactions and warrant further exploration.