ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Assessment, Testing and Applied Measurement
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1567704
This article is part of the Research TopicStudent Voices in Formative Assessment FeedbackView all 8 articles
Unheard and Unused: Why Students Reject Teacher and Peer Feedback
Provisionally accepted
- The City University of New York, New York, United States
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In the area of higher education, feedback has become a significant focus of study for over 30 years. Despite established high-quality feedback criteria, the issue of students not utilizing feedback from instructors and peers persists. This study aims to investigate specific reasons behind feedback rejections in the context of higher education. Using the Student-Feedback Interaction Model (Lipnevich & Smith, 2022), we analyzed responses from 200 undergraduate and graduate students at a large public university in the northeastern USA. Further, we conducted a series of analyses to examine the extent to which individual characteristics (college students' gender, ethnicity, and academic level) predicted the reasons to reject teacher and peer feedback.Our findings indicate that students tend to not use or reject teacher feedback due to ambiguous or unclear messages, negative tone, lack of respect or trust in the teacher, and confidence in their own performance. Peer feedback is commonly rejected because of a perceived lack of peer expertise, ambiguous messages, and negative emotional responses. Gender and educational level were significant predictors of students' reasons for not utilizing feedback, with distinct patterns observed among male students and undergraduates. This study underscores the necessity for feedback strategies that address individual student characteristics and contextual factors.Recommendations include fostering positive teacher-student relationships, enhancing the clarity of feedback, and improving students' skills in peer feedback provision and recipience.
Keywords: Teacher feedback, Peer feedback, feedback rejection, higher education, reason to not use feedback
Received: 27 Jan 2025; Accepted: 14 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lipnevich, Lopera-Oquendo, Tomazin, Gutterman and Florentin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Anastasiya A Lipnevich, The City University of New York, New York, United States
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