Feedback and self-regulated learning in higher education

Formative assessment and feedback are related to learning improvement and self-regulation processes. These processes can be understood as the interplay between personal, behavioural and contextual characteristics. For feedback to be effective it must be properly interpreted, reconstructed and internalized. This article presents the results of a research project on feedback that aimed to achieve two purposes. The first was to describe and compare students' perception about the provided feedback and its relationship with the processes of self-regulated learning (SRA) in the different academic subjects of the project. The second sought to generate an exploratory model, based on PLS-SEM, about the relationships between the features of the received feedback, students' opinion about it, and its effects on SRA and students' satisfaction. A questionnaire was designed to measure students' perception of the feedback and was filled in by 603 students in seven subjects of six university degrees. The findings confirm the exploratory model generated and suggest that students construct a positive perception of feedback that exerts a greater influence on SRA when the following elements are present at a basic level: a concurrent teacher feedback, oral, specific and task-focused, clear and understandable; opportunities for the emergence of a dialogic and interactive peer-feedback; the use of the opportunities offered by virtual environments to give feedback; and a clear initial specification of the task or learning results expected (feed-up).