“Can you tell me more about this?”: Agentic written feedback, teacher expectations, and student learning

Abstract

Teachers are not only tasked with communicating facts, figures, and skills to their students, but they are also responsible for equipping students to be self-sufficient learners who believe in their own capacity to learn and improve. In this paper, we propose that written feedback that offers students agency (what we call ‘agentic feedback’) can be a way for teachers to build more independent and self-efficacious learners, and to instill in students the trust that their teacher believes in them. In the first study, we develop a novel qualitative coding scheme to measure the degree of agency offered in teachers’ written feedback (N = 136) and produce a coherent ‘agentic feedback’ variable. In the second study, we find that middle and high school students (N = 1,260) are sensitive to the amount of agency provided in teachers’ feedback: they perceive that agentic feedback affords more choice and requires more effort for revision, encourages greater learning and improvement on writing, and that teachers who offer more agentic feedback have higher expectations. We discuss implications for future research and application in classrooms.