Trust is fundamental for students to meaningfully engage with feedback—but how do instructors actually build it? This episode features an open access Teaching & Learning Inquiry article focused on building trust through feedback.
See our full episode notes at https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/building-trust-through-feedback/.
This episode features an open access article on building trust through feedback with relationship-building conditions and agency-promoting practices:
Bayraktar, Breana, Kiruthika Ragupathi, and Katherine A. Troyer. 2025. “Building Trust Through Feedback: A Conceptual Framework for Educators.” Teaching and Learning Inquiry 13 (January): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.13.7
This episode was hosted, edited, and produced by Jessie L. Moore, Director of the Center for Engaged Learning and Professor of Professional Writing & Rhetoric. 60-Second SoTL is produced by the Center for Engaged Learning at Elon University.
Music: “Cryptic” by AudioCoffee.
Feedback image in episode art by rawpixel.com on Freepik
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Jessie L. Moore:
Trust is fundamental for students to meaningfully engage with feedback—but how do instructors actually build it? That’s the focus of this week’s 60-second SoTL from Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning. I’m Jessie Moore.
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In “Building Trust Through Feedback: A Conceptual Framework,” Breana Bayraktar, Kiruthika Ragupathi, and Katherine Troyer share survey research on feedback practices and offer a framework for relationship-building conditions and agency-promoting practices that foster trust in feedback cultures. Their article appears in the open access journal, Teaching & Learning Inquiry.
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The researchers surveyed 147 participants at a range of research sites in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia and at varied institutional contexts, including small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and research-intensive universities. The survey, adapted from Winstone and Carless’s 2019 study, included demographic questions, institutional context questions, 11 items related to instructors’ feedback practices, nine items about instructors’ feedback beliefs, and four open-ended questions. This article reports on the open-ended questions. The open-ended questions explore instructors’ feedback strategies, their practices around returning feedback to students, how instructors’ view their feedback strategy as contributing to an inclusive learning experience, and anything else regarding feedback that the participants wanted to share.
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The researchers used deductive coding with pre-established codes, based on prior scholarship on feedback and trust, for initial coding of the open-ended responses. After their initial coding, the research team adapted their codes to reflect emerging themes in the data and then re-coded all of the open-ended survey responses. Their data analysis discussion offers a helpful model for other research teams writing about their coding process.
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The authors identified three environmental conditions that foster trust:
They also highlight three instructor feedback practices that promote student agency:
Together, these conditions and practices form a conceptual framework where trust isn’t a byproduct—it’s actively cultivated. This synergy creates space for reciprocity, vulnerability, and growth in the feedback process.
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The takeaway? Feedback isn’t just about assessing student learning. It’s a relational, social practice that depends on trust and student agency—and instructors can intentionally design for it.
To learn more about this study, visit our show notes for a link to the open access article.
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Jessie Moore:
Join us next week for another snapshot of recent scholarship of teaching and learning on 60-second SoTL from Elon University’s Center for Engaged Learning. Learn more about the Center at www.CenterForEngagedLearning.org.
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