Reconsidering student feedback literacy from an ecological perspective

In response to the paradigm shift of feedback from information to process, the notion of ‘student feedback literacy’, which refers to students’ capacities and dispositions to use feedback, has been increasingly promulgated in the higher education assessment literature recently. Student feedback literacy has been conceptualized into three interrelated characteristics–the ability to appreciate feedback, make judgments and manage emotions–which potentially lead to successful student uptake of feedback information. This commentary is a response to recent attempts to conceptualize student feedback literacy and aims to reconsider the concept from an ecological perspective of learning using a multi-dimensional model comprising three components: the engagement dimension, the contextual dimension and the individual dimension. This expanded model of student feedback literacy is informed by sociocultural theory and the notion of learner agency. Referring to the proposed framework, future research directions on student feedback literacy are put forward.