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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.
Sec. Higher Education
Volume 9 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2024.1475944
This article is part of the Research Topic Empowerment Through Education Innovative Interventions for Higher Education Students View all 6 articles

Profiling Feedback Antecedents in higher Education Students: A Person-Oriented Perspective

Provisionally accepted
Ela Sjølie Ela Sjølie 1*Mari W. Johnsen Mari W. Johnsen 2Peter Van Petegem Peter Van Petegem 3
  • 1 Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
  • 2 Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management, Faculty of Economics and Management, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Sør-Trøndelag, Norway
  • 3 Department of Training and Education Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The ability to give, receive and process feedback is essential for higher education students not only during their studies, but also for their future work life. Despite the extensive amount of research on feedback in education, there is limited research on feedback skills as collaborative skills and on what might influence these skills. Through surveying a large sample of 2907 university students who worked in self-managed project teams, this study explores how individual characteristics as antecedents relate to students' perceived feedback skills. We use a person-oriented approach to examine how these antecedents relate within students and how these profiles relate to perceived feedback skills. In addition to reliability, confirmatory factor analysis provided evidence for the structural validity of a newly developed feedback skills instrument. Five scales were used from existing feedback instruments as antecedents of feedback skills, and these were also found to be valid and reliable. Through a person-oriented approach, we applied a hierarchical and a k-means cluster analysis to create student profiles or groups based on feedback antecedents. We identified five distinct groups of students with common feedback antecedents. The results indicate that the five groups also had different levels of perceived feedback skills. The study contributes to the limited research on the dynamics of giving and receiving feedback from the perspective of students in the context of collaborative learning. It has implications for researchers and practitioners to better understand individual differences and to consider these differences when designing collaborative learning activities and facilitating student teams.

    Keywords: feedback skills, Feedback characteristics, Validation, higher education, personoriented perspective, project-based learning, Student teams

    Received: 20 Sep 2024; Accepted: 30 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Sjølie, Johnsen and Van Petegem. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Ela Sjølie, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.