Investigating the Role of Students’ Feedback-Seeking Actions in Harnessing and Adapting to the Distributed Competence

Feedback-seeking actions are student-initiated dialogic actions directed at meeting their diverse needs concerning the teacher’s instructional activities. Distributed competence refers to the notion that knowledge, skills, and perspectives needed to accomplish the goals of particular activities are distributed amongst individuals and tools of the community. The focus of this study is in contrast to the predominant educational practices related to feedback and competency development. Existing feedback practices and research primarily focus on what and how of providing feedback to students with only limited attention to facilitating student- initiated feedback-seeking. Besides, feedback interventions targeting competency development focus on improving individual performance by encouraging comparison or competition amongst each other. However, given the rapidly changing human activities where even well- regarded knowledge, skills, perspectives, and tools become obsolete, being proactive and cooperative in harnessing and adapting to the distributed competence takes the center stage. Therefore, we investigate the possible role of students’ feedback-seeking actions in harnessing and adapting to the distributed competence. Our findings reveal the processes by which students’ feedback-seeking actions contribute toward harnessing and adapting to the distributed competence in a particular instructional activity of significance. The study involved two groups of chemistry students working on a complex representational problem pertaining to the synthesis of an important medicinal drug. The findings are relevant for future research on designing sustainable classroom instructions and CSCL environments.