A quantitative study of the relationship between feedback orientation and students’ motivation to learn

As academic practitioners, enhancing student engagement and enabling self-direction is key to our practice. One of the ways that we can equip students to fully engage with their own learning is by providing timely and effective feedback which they can apply to future assessments and learning opportunities (Lynam & Cachia, 2018). Feedback orientation is a measure of how feedback is internalised and utilised by students. Higher levels of feedback orientation indicate that a student is receptive to feedback and likely to act on it; and is also known to predict improvements in performance, self-regulation and motivation (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996). Previous findings by Stock et al. (2018) suggest that although academic grade is not predicted by feedback orientation, there is a positive correlation between feedback orientation and extrinsic motivation. Since extrinsic motivation has been shown to produce poorer academic outcomes than intrinsic motivation (Asikainen et al., 2013), this relationship raises concerns about the possibility of students responding to feedback as an extrinsic reward, something that is known to lead to a reduction in intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000). The data presented here are from the first, cross-sectional, study of a two study programme of research. The implications of these preliminary findings for the use of feedback – by both staff and students – will be discussed. The second study, also introduced in this presentation, will be an experiment examining the effect of positive and negative feedback upon student motivation. It is expected that those with high feedback orientation will be more susceptible to increases in extrinsic motivation caused by the feedback they receive. The findings of these studies will increase our understanding of how students respond to our feedback, which, in turn, can inform our practice and improve our ability to engage students in their own learning