The role of student workshops in creating instruments for students – The example of the Teachers’ Feedback Practice Questionnaire

Abstract

The aim of our research is to develop a self-report student questionnaire about teachers’ feedback related to motivation to learn. The Teachers’ Feedback Practice Questionnaire is based on Hattie and Timperley’s (2007) feedback model and Koenka and Anderman’s (2019) principles regarding the motivational impact of teacher feedback. It includes seven subscales: task-focused, specific, self-referenced, self-regulation, normative feedback, feedback for next steps, and feedback about personal aspects. The development process consists of four stages: creating initial items, conducting student workshops, expert validation, and pilot study with students. This paper focuses on student workshops to highlight the benefits of involving students in the development process. The research questions of the workshops explored the alignment of the questionnaire’s feedback types with students’ perceived and reported classroom experiences; assessed to what extent students interpreted the questionnaire items relating to the feedback types in accordance with the researchers’ intentions; and determined the appropriateness of the language of the student questionnaire. It was found that the self-regulation feedback subscale was not entirely consistent with students’ reported experiences; therefore it was removed. Findings revealed that some students tended to conflate task-focused feedback with specific feedback. To address this, we implemented targeted item-wording revisions to enhance the conceptual clarity between these two subscales. Our results confirm that involving students in the questionnaire development process can contribute the cognitive and ecological validity of a new instrument as well as to the clarity of the wording of items.