Assessing metacognition-based student feedback literacy for academic writing

Student feedback literacy is essential to writing in a foreign language context. Feedback is a process through which learners become more familiar with their work quality and integrate constructive criticism to produce stronger written work. Implicit in this process is the assumption that learners should not passively receive information but actively seek, generate, process, and use feedback to apply new knowledge in current or subsequent writing tasks. Learners’ metacognitive awareness and skills may influence their participation in feedback-related activities that inform the monitoring and control of their writing process and determine their writing performance. However, little attention has been given to a systematic investigation of metacognition in feedback literacy. The present study, drawing upon a self-regulatory perspective, bridges this gap by fulfilling two purposes: (a) to measure a scale on metacognition-based student feedback literacy; and (b) to delineate the predictive effects of different components of the scale on academic writing performance. The results provided evidence for metacognitive awareness and skills in student feedback literacy and showed the predictive effects of the scale, e.g., feedback-related strategies in participation (FRSP), motivation (M), feedback-related monitoring strategies (FRMS), and strategy knowledge (SK) on EFL learners’ performance in academic writing. Relevant implications were also discussed.