David Carless, University of Hong Kong
Last week, I did an online talk for a group of colleagues at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University about one my favorite topics: feedback seeking. I drew links between feedback seeking for academics, and feedback seeking by students.
Feedback seeking can be usefully defined as purposely seeking information about one’s own level of performance, interpreting it and applying it (Anseel et al. 2015). The application is an important aspect, resonating with the idea of feedback uptake in feedback literacy research.
I’m beginning to develop a firm conviction that teachers in higher education need to model and demonstrate to students how they themselves as academic professionals generate and use feedback information of different kinds. Sometimes, teachers tell me that their students are somewhat lacklustre in engaging with, and using feedback, but to be frank, isn’t it the case that academics often respond to student feedback in similarly uninspired ways? The conventional end-of-semester student feedback on our teaching may or may not be appreciated or processed diligently, and it comes too late for a feedback loop to be meaningfully closed. And if we are not modelling engagement with feedback, then what message does that send to students?
A useful, practical feedback seeking strategy for teachers is to elicit mid-semester comments from students. What is going well? What needs changing? Any other comments? Then in future classes, the feedback loop can be closed and the uptake of feedback can be evidenced to the students we are currently teaching.
In the talk, I highlighted two key sets of feedback seeking strategies: inquiry and monitoring. Inquiry is relatively self-evident in reaching out to others (including GenAI) through well-formulated questions. Monitoring is a bit more complicated in that it involves observing the learning environment around you and drawing inferences for your own development. A useful example of a monitoring strategy is analyzing exemplars of target performance. For academics, exemplars could be journal articles, successful grant applications or teaching materials. For students, exemplars could be essays written by classmates or relevant online materials.
One of the key issues in feedback seeking research is cost-value compromises. Inquiry takes some effort in identifying interlocutors, and some individuals feel uncomfortable in revealing vulnerability or gaps in knowledge. There are less costs to monitoring because it is mainly a private activity, and the literature reveals that monitoring is more commonly reported than inquiry (e.g. Leenknecht et al. 2019).
There are limitations to only relying on monitoring, but existing literature does not tell us much about how and why students combine inquiry and monitoring. Our qualitative feedback seeking paper that has just come out (Zhou, Carless, and Nieminen, 2025) contributes to filling this space. The first author interviewed 27 university students in Shanghai about their feedback seeking practices.
Students offered some interesting examples of combined inquiry and monitoring, and two are highlighted below:
I recently took an exam with written test and interview. For the written test I practice questions, check scores to gauge progress, then review to identify weaknesses and target them for improvement. For the interview, I practice mock interviews with a classmate and we give each other feedback. These two different exam formats require different ways of obtaining feedback (informant 1).
When I joined a translation contest, I first revised my draft myself and then asked my friend for suggestions. After revising it based on her feedback, I went to my mentor for more advice. Then I combined both their inputs and made final adjustments on my own. (informant 2).
In the first example, the student uses monitoring to prepare for the written test and peer inquiry for the interview, illustrating different feedback seeking strategies for different tasks. The second example is a particularly good one because the student uses monitoring then peer inquiry, followed by teacher inquiry from her mentor and finally carries out considered feedback uptake. These accounts of integrating monitoring with inquiry suggest that tailoring feedback seeking strategies to the task adds value. Further research could investigate the interplay between inquiry and monitoring, for example, might sub-optimal experiences of inquiry lead to preferences for monitoring?
I concluded the talk with three recommendations for teachers in promoting feedback seeking amongst university-level students: model feedback seeking and uptake; embed feedback seeking within the curriculum; develop relational climates of openness and trust for feedback seeking.
Importantly, if we want students to be pro-active participants in feedback processes, it helps if they see teacher role models of generating and using feedback information. The extent of teacher engagement in feedback seeking, processing and acting surely influences students.
References
Anseel, F., Beatty, A., Shen, W., Lievens, F., & Sackett, P. (2015). How are we doing after 30 years? A meta-analytic review of the antecedents and outcomes of feedback-seeking behavior. Journal of Management, 41(1), 318-348. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0149206313484521
Leenknecht, M., Hompus, P., & Van der Schaaf, M. (2019). Feedback seeking behaviour in higher education: The association with students’ goal orientation and deep learning approach. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 44, 1069-1078. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02602938.2019.1571161
Zhou, H., Carless, D., Nieminen, J.H. (2025). Students’ motivations for feedback seeking: The value of combined monitoring and inquiry. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2025.2596351.
