Perceptions of international baccalaureate diploma programme (IBDP) teachers, graduates and students on sustainable feedback: a case study in an IB world school

Abstract

This single case study investigated the perceptions of teachers, graduates, and students on sustainable feedback in an International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) school through survey design. The data were collected through Feedback for Learning Survey, originally developed by Henderson, Boud, Molly, Dawson, Phillips, and Ryan (n.d.) for the research project Feedback for Learning: Closing the Assessment Loop and adapted to the IBDP school context. The survey explored participants’ perceptions on the purpose of feedback, characteristics, and factors influencing its sustainability. The results of this single case study showed that IBDP teachers primarily recognized feedback as a tool for students’ growth, reflection, and self-regulation while IBDP graduates and students primarily viewed feedback as a means of improving the quality of the student work. The findings also revealed that teachers know their feedback is effective when they clearly see its impact on learning outcomes and improvement between the first and subsequent tasks whereas graduates and students define effective feedback as detailed, specific, personalized, and criteria-referenced. Another major finding is that while sustainable feedback practices such as dialogic feedback, encouraging students to seek feedback and designing follow-up tasks to support future performance, are present across the school, their frequency and visibility differ according to stakeholders. Therefore, this research can contribute to the sustainable feedback literature by illustrating how feedback is perceived and enacted in an IBDP school setting. Furthermore, it offers implications for enhancing feedback literacy of stakeholders and for developing institutional strategies that support sustainable feedback practices.