Non Engagement Feedback

This week I would like to share a recent SoTL article entitled “Non Engagement and unsuccessful engagement with feedback in lower secondary education: The role of student characteristics” by Jansen et al. (2025). Feedback can be a powerful learning intervention and learners’ active engagement is assumed to be one of the most important determinants of feedback effectiveness. However, meta-analyses have shown that not all feedback, whether provided by teachers or computers, effectively promotes performance, and some studies have even reported negative feedback effects (Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Wisniewski et al., 2020). Student engagement with feedback rather than the feedback itself is crucial to learning (Panadero, 2023). First, learners must notice and pay attention to the feedback. Second, they must cognitively process the feedback or decode and make sense of the feedback. Then, on the basis of this initial processing, learners decide whether they accept and implement the feedback.

There were two primary research questions explored:

1. How many students 

   1. (a) did not behaviorally engage with the feedback (i.e., nonengagement), and 

   2. (b) showed no improvement in their task performance in the revision, even though they had engaged with the feedback (i.e., unsuccessful engagement).

2. What role do individual differences play in determining who does not engage and does not successfully engage with feedback?

The authors aimed to make students’ engagement with feedback visible by focusing on their text revisions as an indicator of feedback response. On the basis of theoretical models of feedback processing, they differentiated between behavioral nonengagement (i.e., not revising at all after receiving feedback) and unsuccessful engagement (i.e., revising after receiving feedback, but not improving in the process). 

Capitalizing on this distinction, the authors compared the characteristics of students in both groups with those of students who (successfully) engaged with the feedback. They provided automated computer-based feedback on a writing task to a sample of 937 students (49% female), asking students to revise their texts according to the feedback. The finding indicated that

• 20% of the students did not make any revisions to their text after receiving feedback (nonengagement);

• 47% of the students did not improve their performance after working with the feedback during a text revision (unsuccessful engagement);

• Male students were significantly more likely than female students to ignore feedback completely;

• students with lower cognitive abilities were more likely to show nonengagement;

• for unsuccessful engagement, cognitive abilities and the English grade were relevant predictors; and 

• positive effects of intrinsic task value on successful feedback engagement.

Most surprising is that higher-performing students were actually less likely to improve after receiving feedback. Either there is a motivation issue or some kind of ceiling effect of diminishing returns where further improvement becomes increasingly difficult.

Computer-based systems can support teachers in noticing disengagement. Monitoring student feedback behavior via teacher dashboards could be an effective way of detecting which students need support when learning with feedback and could support teachers in providing specific support in these cases (Knoop-van Campen & Molenaar, 2020).

References

Meyer, J., Jansen, T., & Fleckenstein, J. (2025).Non Engagementand unsuccessful engagement with feedback in lower secondary education: The role of student characteristics, Contemporary Educational Psychology.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cedpsych.2025.102363.