In virtual learning environments, feedback should not be understood as a simple correction at the end of an assignment, but as an opportunity to think, revise, and improve. The article by Rosa M. Mayordomo Saiz, Anna Espasa Roca, Teresa Guasch Pascual, and Montserrat Martínez Melo addresses precisely this issue: what conditions encourage students to engage cognitively with the feedback they receive.
In an educational context increasingly mediated by digital platforms, the study focuses on a key aspect: it is not enough to provide online feedback; it is necessary to design situations that help students read it, understand it, interpret it, and use it to regulate their own learning.
The research analyzes the relationship between motivational orientation, beliefs about control over learning, self-efficacy, and expectations of success with students’ cognitive engagement. Through a quasi-experiment conducted at a fully online university, the authors compare students who receive feedback during the process of completing an activity and are able to revise and resubmit it with others who only receive feedback at the end.
The results show that motivational orientation does not generate significant differences, partly because all students display a strong orientation toward learning. However, beliefs about control over one’s own learning, self-efficacy, and expectations of success do influence how students engage with final feedback, especially when that feedback arrives late and there are no opportunities for revision.
The article’s most relevant contribution is showing that technopedagogical design can mediate these individual differences. When feedback is provided during the process and accompanied by the opportunity to revise the task, students become more engaged: they make greater efforts to understand it, better identify positive aspects and areas for improvement, and use it to plan and regulate their learning. This conclusion is especially valuable for online education, where communication is often asynchronous and written.
Rather than viewing feedback as information delivered by the teacher, the article invites us to conceive it as part of a carefully designed learning experience, in which students take on an active, reflective, and progressively autonomous role.
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How to Cite: Mayordomo Saiz, R. M., Espasa Roca, A., Guasch Pascual, T., & Martínez-Melo, M. (2023). Motivational Orientation, Self-efficacy and Expectancy: Cognitive Engagement with Feedback in Virtual Environments. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 26(2), 135–154. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.26.2.36242
