Improving Student Feedback Literacy Through Collaborative Dialogic Feedback intervention: An Action Research study at a University in Southwest China

Background and Aim: Student feedback literacy (SFL), a group of cognitive and dispositional competencies for students to benefit from feedback, has been viewed as a key part of lifelong learning capacity. At a university in Southwest China, students and teachers reported low levels of SFL and the absence of feedback practices for cultivating SFL. The action research aims to testify to the efficacy of integrating collaborative dialogic feedback (CDF) intervention into a university course curriculum to improve SFL. Materials and Methods: A quasi-experimental study was conducted with 76 sophomore students from a university in southwest China majoring in business English. Three rounds of collaborative dialogic feedback intervention were conducted in the experimental group (N=37), and teacher-dominated feedback was conducted in the control group (N=39). Data were collected over a 16-week semester, including the pre-and post-intervention student questionnaires of both groups, five types of student feedback documents, and post-intervention interviews of nine informants from the experimental groups. Results: The quantitative data showed that students from the experimental group perceived significant improvement in appreciation of and readiness to engage in feedback, and eliciting, generating, processing, and enacting feedback information, with a p-value of the results of the Wilcoxon signed-rank test less than 0.05, and students from the control group perceived no improvement. The content analysis of the student feedback document demonstrated a gradual improvement in the behaviors related to the six dimensions of feedback literacy during the eight feedback activities of the intervention. In the interviews, students attributed their improvement of feedback literacy to sufficient teacher support, opportunities for ongoing practices, and experiences of benefiting from being the key agent of feedback available in the collaborative dialogic feedback intervention. Conclusion: The results of both quantitative and qualitative data support that the collaborative dialogic feedback intervention could facilitate the development of student feedback literacy.