Feedback has much potential for learning, when it also gives students guidance to bridge the gap between performance and goals. Effective feedback is more than telling students what criteria there...Show moreFeedback has much potential for learning, when it also gives students guidance to bridge the gap between performance and goals. Effective feedback is more than telling students what criteria there are to meet and appraising their performance. Teachers should also give suggestions or proposals for the best course of action to bridge the gap between performance and goal. Whether the student accepts this feedback and is willing to follow recommendations depends on the teacher approach to communicate this feedback and on students’ goal orientation. This study investigated to what extent the approach of the teacher and the goal orientation of the student had influence on student's use of feedback. Distinctions were made between directive and reflective approaches and between performance goal orientation and learning goal orientation. The study also tested if higher feedback use led to higher performance. Several dialogs were registered and their content was analysed on the balance between discussing the criteria to meet, appraising performance, and giving recommendations. This study partially confirmed that the conversation between teacher and student exerts influence on the student acceptance of and compliance with feedback. The teacher approach appeared to make little difference. The performance goal orientation of students, unexpectedly, had a negative impact both on the acceptance of feedback and on the use of recommendations. Students who followed recommendations had, as expected, a higher performance in the second-stage. The content analysis revealed that teachers mainly appraise the performance of student and give little recommendations on how to improve performance.Show less
The transformation of our economy from an industrial into a knowledge economy changed every aspect of business dynamics and competitive advantage. Workplace climate and leadership exert a major...Show moreThe transformation of our economy from an industrial into a knowledge economy changed every aspect of business dynamics and competitive advantage. Workplace climate and leadership exert a major influence in fomenting an environment that fosters reflective skills and workplace learning, key factors for knowledge productivity and competitive advantage to take place. The present thesis examines the relationship between workplace climate and workplace leaning and investigates the predictive power of leadership with regards to reflective skills. The research consisted of a comparative study of two organizations’ workplace climate and workplace learning (Company A, N= 32; Company B, N=34), measured with the “Workplace Climate Questionnaire” and the “Knowledge Productivity Survey”, respectively. Our empirical results show that workplace climate and workplace learning are indeed related; however our expectation of confirming that leadership exerts an influence on reflective skills was not supported. These findings may suggest that, in the current economic context outlined by the latest global economic crisis featured by downsizing, leadership may not be the prevailing influencing factor with regards to reflective skills and workplace learning, but other workplace climate features such as workload. This cue indicates that this subject matter may have evolved since the advent of the knowledge economy and new variables come into play. We recommend the replication of this study with knowledge intensive organizations and with a larger sample composed by respondents being knowledge workers in order to verify the current results, and also suggest conducting it adopting workload as independent variable in order to investigate this new hypothesis.Show less