Assessment literacy is an essential professional requirement for teachers in the 21st century (Popham, 2018). With the increasing recognition of the crucial roles played by formative assessment in education, feedback literacy has become one key component of assessment literacy (Ayalon & Wilkie, 2020). 

Although feedback from teachers has been identified as one of the most significant factors influencing students’ learning, it has been found that feedback is apparently ineffective in classrooms due to teachers’ weak feedback literacy (Hattie & Clarke, 2019). Therefore, it is urgent to investigate how the feedback literacy of teachers is developed at both pre-service and in-service stages.

This project will investigate the development of feedback literacy specifically in preservice teachers for two reasons. First, pre-service teacher education is the initial stage of developing teacher feedback literacy and establishes a foundation for teachers’ feedback practices in school classrooms. Second, during the period of pre-service teacher education, pre-service teachers possess dual identities as both future school teachers and university students. Such a unique situation (i) requires them to develop teacher and student feedback literacies simultaneously and (ii) provides them with a precious opportunity to think about feedback from the perspectives of both teacher and student so that the development of their teacher feedback literacy can further enhance their student feedback literacy, and vice versa. Despite the significance and uniqueness of the feedback literacy development of preservice teachers, there is a lack of research into (i) how dual feedback literacies of preservice teachers change over time, (ii) how these dual feedback literacies interact, and (iii) what factors mediate the development and interplay of these dual feedback literacies.

A mixed-methods approach will be adopted in this project to address the research gaps identified above. Pre-and-post surveys will be administered to 1100 pre-service teachers from five cohorts (freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors and graduates) of a leading teacher education university in Hong Kong to explore the trajectory of their dual feedback literacy development and the interplay between two types of feedback literacies. Qualitative data (including reflective logs and individual interviews) will be collected after the post-survey from 90 of the participating pre-service teachers (18 from each cohort) to more closely examine the interplay of the dual feedback literacies and explore the factors mediating their development and interaction.

The findings of this project will make both theoretical and practical contributions to pre-service assessment education, which remains unsophisticated at present. In terms of theory, the findings will enrich the conceptual understanding of dual feedback literacies and advance the knowledge base of their development and interaction. More importantly, the project has the potential to generate a theoretical framework to illustrate the dynamics of pre-service teachers’ dual feedback literacies by synthesising cognitive, sociocultural and sociomaterial perspectives and multiple data sources. For practice, the findings will enlighten teacher educators and policy makers on how to effectively design and deliver pre-service assessment education to better support pre-service teachers’ dual feedback literacy development.