Teacher Feedback and Students’ Self-Concept, Intrinsic Value, and Achievement in Mathematics: Juxtaposing Between- and Within-Person Perspectives on Long-Term Reciprocal Relationships

For decades, feedback to students has been discussed as one of the most powerful predictors of student learning 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 parts of the variability in effects of feedback on student learning. Therefore, more recent work has proposed a shift toward models that more strongly emphasize the role of the student in the effectiveness of feedback and investigate how teacher feedback is perceived and how it is related to specific student characteristics (e.g., motivation and achievement). In this study, we echo the call for a stronger focus on the student when investigating the long-term effectiveness of teacher feedback using rich data from 2,121 German lower secondary school students who were repeatedly assessed in Grades 5 to 7. More specifically, we investigated 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 using full-forward cross-lagged panel models (FF-CLPMs) and random intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPMs). Considering these variables simultaneously, we found evidence for 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 related to subsequent self-concept but not to any of the other variables. Our results underscore the need to more thoroughly investigate how feedback is longitudinally and reciprocally related to student motivation and achievement.