Students’ Profiles in Digital Feedback

Abstract

E-feedback literacy (Chong, 2021; Hanningan et al., 2022; Bearman et al., 2024) addresses the use of technologies to enhance the ability to seek, understand, use and produce evaluative judgements that support both discursive competence and the learning strategies to achieve it. Although a wide variety of online tools, including chatbots based on generative artificial intelligence (Waziana et al., 2024), are now openly available to students, there is a lack of research on the impact of feedback through these digital resources on the development of their discourse competence. With a qualitative-interpretative methodology, we analyse how university groups of students conceive the digital feedback practices in which they participate to develop their written discursive competence, in order to delineate discourse profiles that contribute to better adapt the training proposals for students in digital feedback. The results of the analysis show diverse learner profiles according to their ability to take advantage of digital feedback, depending on (i) their ‘agency’, i.e. the degree of autonomy they exercise in their decision-making to appropriate feedback throughout the feedback process and generate internal feedback, (ii) the awareness they have developed of their academic and disciplinary culture, that of their peers and their teachers (‘interculturality’) to manage the interaction and (iii) their willingness to compare, question, diversify and transform (with ‘critical attitude’) these practices of digital feedback on  their written texts.