Volume 4 2025
Breana Bayraktar
Abstract
By scaffolding feedback literacy through collaborative modeling and guided individual reflection, I shifted feedback from a one-way transmission to a process that builds student self-agency and critical thinking. This article shares strategies for helping students learn to engage thoughtfully with feedback and revise creatively and independently.
As a former instructor of various English as a second language reading and writing courses at the community college level (first and second year undergraduates), and currently teaching graduate students in course entitled Higher Ed in the Digital Age – I have believed that thoughtful feedback naturally leads to better learning. If I spend time writing detailed comments, I assume students will read my comments carefully, reflect, and improve. But when I was part of a study on instructor feedback beliefs and practices (Bayraktar, Ragupathi, & Troyer, 2025), my co-researchers and I discovered a troubling gap: while nearly all faculty valued feedback as a powerful influence on learning, far fewer designed opportunities to teach students how to engage with that feedback.
To truly foster student agency and self-regulation—key outcomes of deeper learning—we must explicitly scaffold how students receive, interpret, and act on feedback.
The realization that many faculty do not teach students how to engage with feedback shifted my thinking. I began to see that feedback, by itself, is not enough. To truly foster student agency and self-regulation—key outcomes of deeper learning—we must explicitly scaffold how students receive, interpret, and act on feedback.
While the expectations in terms of writing ability/performance is different with the two levels I have taught, I have found that intentional and explicit support in unpacking feedback is helpful for undergraduate as well as graduate students. In this article, I share how I began building simple feedback structures into my teaching to support critical learning outcomes.
Student agency. One of the clearest deeper learning outcomes missing from traditional feedback practices is student agency—the ability of students to take ownership of their learning process. Student agency involves learners setting goals, monitoring their progress, and taking initiative in their learning pathways (Bandura, 2001).
Agency is not innate; it must be taught and practiced. By explicitly teaching students how to request, interpret, and apply feedback, I aim to nurture their ability to act with self-agency in their learning processes. Research emphasizes that fostering agency leads to higher motivation, deeper engagement, and improved academic outcomes (Nicol & Kushwah, 2024).
Student-driven. I embed small but intentional scaffolds into my courses: inviting students to request feedback on specific aspects of their work, modeling how to interpret feedback, and I coach students through action planning for revisions. These changes help shift feedback from a passive reception of comments to an active, student-driven process—and create stronger connections between feedback and future learning.
Categorizing Comments
An activity I used, as an undergraduate instructor of reading and writing English as a second language classes, to explicitly teach students how to engage with feedback, involves working as a class to analyze and address instructor comments on a model paper. First, I walked students through identifying the type of feedback given—such as issues with organization, coherence, grammar, word choice, strength of evidence, thesis clarity, or argument development.
Typically, I started by providing students with a list of categories of common issues that they would use to classify feedback comments, so that they can begin to recognize, for example, that a comment from me that reads “awkward phrasing” is a grammar or word choice issue, while a comment asking “How does this paragraph support your thesis?” is probably addressing the overall argument development of the paper. I encouraged students to identify categories that I might not have captured on the list, as generation of ideas helps to foster discussion of different examples of issues, within the model papers.
Peer collaboration. In small groups, students practice classifying feedback comments and deciding on an appropriate action: for example, creating a reverse outline to address organization, writing stronger transitions for coherence, revising a thesis for clarity, or seeking peer review for grammar and word choice. Each group shares their thinking with the class so we can compare strategies and discuss possible alternatives.
Individual analysis. After the collaborative practice of analyzing feedback, students apply the process independently, to their own work.This activity helps demystify feedback by connecting comments to specific revision strategies and reinforces the idea that feedback is actionable information, not personal criticism.
“Big-picture” issues. As students apply this process to their own work, they are encouraged to identify the most significant issues with their paper, which typically means focusing on the “big-picture” concerns first. I guide students to begin with their overall argument (e.g., clarity of the thesis, understanding of the assignment prompt) and then focus on issues related to coherence (e.g., development of the argument through supporting paragraphs, use of evidence), and then on clarity (e.g., word choice, sentence structure). Guiding students to focus on the more holistic, big-picture issues first prevents students from spending time on word choice and sentence structure issues that might become moot points once the larger issues of argument, organization, and accurate understanding of the prompt are addressed.
Choosing actions. As students identify an issue they would like to address, they are asked to decide how to respond, and I prompt them to remember the actions they discussed in the earlier phase of working in small groups, to classify and respond to feedback comments.There is no minimum or maximum number of strategies students should apply; rather, I encourage students to revise their work, in response to the big-pictures concerns that have been identified, and then to seek out additional feedback – from a peer, the writing center, or myself – to guide subsequent rounds of revision.
Self-Regulation
In addition to building agency, I have realized that effective feedback scaffolding is needed to cultivate students’ self-regulation skills—students’ ability to monitor, evaluate, and adjust their own learning. Self-regulated learners actively manage their cognitive, motivational, and behavioral processes toward achieving learning goals (Zimmerman, 2002). Our research showed that while most instructors believed feedback should help students manage their learning, fewer actively designed opportunities for students to reflect on or apply feedback independently (Bayraktar, Ragupathi, & Troyer, 2025) Developing self-regulation is closely tied to students’ ability to use feedback meaningfully, as feedback prompts learners to assess their progress and adapt strategies accordingly.
Structured self-evaluation. To provide scaffolding that promotes student’ self-regulation skills, I integrate structured self-evaluation checkpoints after major assignments. Before submitting revisions, students complete a short reflection identifying (1) one piece of feedback they receive (2) how they address it in revision,and (3) what strategies they would use on future assignments. These reflections are required before resubmitting revised work and carry a specific point value for both the reflection and the revisions made, making feedback use an explicit and graded part of the assignment cycle.
Over time, this process encourages students to engage more thoughtfully—and, if not always eagerly, then at least more deliberately—with feedback and strengthens their ability to critically assess their own learning progress. Through these reflections, students practice thinking critically about the quality of their work, identifying areas for improvement, and creatively solving challenges they encountered during revision.
Graduate vs. Undergraduates
While graduate students are expected to more quickly be able to apply the strategies I have discussed; students in writing-intensive/writing-focused courses spend more time learning how to understand and apply feedback than students in less writing-focused courses. All students submitting revisions are expected to complete reflections, where they discuss the feedback they received and how they addressed the feedback in their revision, and all students complete a holistic, end-of-course reflection on their overall learning and growth that includes specific prompts about how their approach to the feedback process has evolved.
Reflections
Shifting my approach to feedback, not only supported my students’ learning—it also changed my own experience as an instructor. In the past, I often felt frustrated after spending hours writing detailed feedback, only to see little evidence that students read or acted on it. It sometimes felt like a one-sided conversation. I tried many methods over the years—grading conferences, audio recorded feedback, single-point rubrics, structured peer review—and while some of these changes made a difference, none of them worked as well as I hoped. Integrating reflection checkpoints and explicitly teaching students how to use feedback shifted that dynamic. I now see students engaging with my comments more thoughtfully and asking more purposeful questions, and I feel a stronger sense of partnership with them. This shift has made the feedback process far more rewarding for me and has strengthened the relationships I build with students throughout the course.
Reflecting on this shift, I see feedback differently now—not as a final comment on completed work, but as a conversation that shapes how students learn. The biggest lesson from my research and classroom practice was that scaffolding feedback engagement is not extra work; it is the work of fostering deeper learning. If I could offer advice to other educators, it would be to start small: build one explicit feedback conversation into each assignment cycle, ask students to reflect once on how they used feedback, or invite them to identify one question they have about their next steps. These small scaffolds, repeated over time, can transform feedback from a one-way street into a powerful learning partnership.
REFERENCES
Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory: An agentic perspective. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 1–26.
Bayraktar, B., Ragupathi, K., & Troyer, K. A. (2025). Building Trust Through Feedback: A Conceptual Framework for Educators. Teaching and Learning Inquiry, 13. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.13.7
Nicol, D. J., & Kushwah, L. (2024). Shifting feedback agency to students by having them write their own feedback comments. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(3), 419–439. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2023.2265080
Zimmerman, B. J. (2002). Becoming a self-regulated learner: An overview. Theory into Practice, 41(2), 64–70.
Breana Bayraktar, EdD is Educational Developer at Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning and affiliate faculty, teaching graduate level courses with the Higher Education Program at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. Prior to joining the Stearns Center, Breana Bayraktar taught English as a second language at the community college level. Dr. Bayraktar can be reached at bbayrakt@gmu.edu.