An Examination of Students' Adaptation, Aggression, and Apprehension Traits with their Instructional Feedback Orientations

Feedback orientations refer to students' perceptions of instructional feedback utility, retention, sensitivity, and confidentiality. In this paper, we report three studies that investigated the relationships among feedback orientations and communication traits. Specifically, we examined the associations among communication adaptation traits (Study 1), aggression traits (Study 2), and apprehension traits (Study 3). The results of Study 1 (N =149) indicated that students high in cognitive flexibility and responsiveness reported retaining and using instructors' feedback and were less sensitive to feedback than other participants. Findings from Study 2 (N =182) showed that students who were high in verbal aggressiveness, Machiavellianism, and tolerance for disagreement found their instructors' feedback less useful and retained less feedback than other participants. The results of Study 3 (N =172) revealed that students who were high in communication apprehension and low in intellectual flexibility reported being sensitive to receiving feedback, preferred to receive feedback privately, and did not find feedback to be overly useful. Results may be used by instructors to better provide students with useful, memorable, nonthreatening, and private feedback in the classroom.