Considering the concept of recipience in student learning from a modified Bernsteinian perspective

Abstract

The concept of recipience is emerging within the literature as a useful idea to inform our understanding of student engagement with feedback. In this paper, the applicability of the concept of recipience is broadened from its origins in the literature on student feedback to consider its role in developing student knowledge structures that are more receptive to development. This will promote cumulative/meaningful learning that is required to construct professional knowledge. By drawing on Legitimation Code Theory, and visualising the morphology of target knowledge structures in relation to their position on the semantic plane (of semantic gravity vs. semantic density), a fresh perspective is offered to inform student learning that can suggest ways of enhancing the quality of student learning. This is achieved by explicitly enabling the construction of a more coherent perspective of the knowledge terrain generated by complex curricula.