Teacher feedback and students’ self-concept, intrinsic value, and achievement in mathematics: Juxtaposing between- and within-person perspectives on long-term reciprocal relationships

Abstract

For decades, the feedback teachers give to students has been discussed as one of the most powerful predictors of students’ motivation and achievement. Previous studies have suggested that the type of feedback and its degree of elaboration, immediacy, and relatability are central to its effectiveness. However, these factors explain only some of the variability in the effects of feedback on students’ motivation and achievement. Thus, more recent work has proposed a shift toward models that more strongly emphasize the role of the student in the effectiveness of feedback. In this study, we answer the call for a stronger focus on the student when investigating the long-term interplay between students’ perceptions of teacher feedback and students’ motivation and achievement by using rich data from 2,121 German lower secondary school students who were repeatedly assessed in Grades 5 to 7. More specifically, we used full-forward cross-lagged panel models (FF-CLPMs) and random intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPMs) to investigate reciprocal relationships between students’ perceptions of different types of teacher feedback (i.e., at the self-level, the process level, and the self-regulation level) and students’ self-concept, intrinsic value, and achievement in mathematics. By considering these variables simultaneously, we found evidence of associations between prior self-concept, intrinsic value, achievement, and perceptions of different forms of subsequent teacher feedback. Furthermore, we found that prior perceptions of feedback were positively related to subsequent self-concept. Our results underscore the need to more thoroughly investigate how feedback is longitudinally and reciprocally related to students’ motivation and achievement.