Exploring Students’ Perceived Needs and Ideas About Feedback in Online Learning Environments: Implications for Digital Design

Introduction

Online learning tasks are an important example of self-regulated learning tasks, where learners must independently regulate decisions, strategies, processes, and evaluation involved in learning from instructional materials (Williams, 1996). Because self-regulated learning involves a complex interaction between students’ personal beliefs, individual behavior, and environmental factors such as instructional context and learning materials (Pintrich, 2000; Tseng & Kuo, 2010; Zimmerman & Schunk, 2001), it has been suggested that research on feedback and self-regulated learning should be tightly coupled. Even incidentally-provided feedback can influence self-regulated learning processes such as calibration and monitoring (Butler & Winne, 1995). Understanding students’ expectations and values regarding feedback has important implications for online learning, since students deploy a variety of individual perceptions (e.g., self-beliefs), processes (e.g., comprehension strategies), and behaviors (e.g., digital interactions) to construct their own learning during self-directed tasks (Winne & Perry, 2000; Zimmerman & Schunk, 2001).