Empowering agency through learner-orchestrated self-generated feedback

Recent scholarship emphasises the capacity to self-generate feedback to develop learner agency and avoid bottlenecks as students wait for feedback. Technology can help by mediating access to various level-appropriate resources such as peers’ work-in-progress, uptake strategies and teacher feedback. These can be used as ‘comparators’ for self-generated feedback. This cumulative longitudinal study investigated learner orchestration of self-generated feedback within an ‘open access’ Google Drive/Classroom mediated feedback environment, inductively analysing reflective writing (N = 40), and interviews (N = 30) from several research writing cohorts at a South Korean university from 2018 to 2022. Findings evidence that participants generated feedback from comparisons with peers’ work, uptake strategies and teacher feedback. This helped them better understand tasks, calibrate evaluative judgement, and improve work. Comparisons with exemplars/peers’ work supported global-level insights while peer feedback highlighted aspects outside of conscious awareness evidencing synergy between methods. Peer/teacher feedback replaced the need for teacher instructions for comparison processes and insights for avoiding psychological risks of self-generated feedback were also gleaned. The results are original and significant in illustrating hitherto unexplored benefits of open access to peers’ work-in-progress and teacher feedback, how students exercise agency in orchestrating learning, exemplifying teacher set-up, and elucidating the evolving concept of teacher feedback literacy.