How self-construals moderate attention and responses to comparative feedback, and perceptions of summative assessment fairness

The overarching aim of this thesis is to understand how learner self-construals, which are the internally held concepts of oneself being independent or interdependent with others, are associated with perceptions of, and responses to, formative feedback and summative assessments within the learning process. Formative and summative assessment are important areas of exploration in learning theory and have practical implications for the learning process. Yet, the potential roles of self-construals in learner perceptions of, and responses to, formative and summative assessments is an understudied area of inquiry. This thesis seeks to fill some of the gaps in this area of knowledge and asks, do self-construals relate to variations in attention to different types of formative comparative feedback, self-assessments of performance, learning task performance after feedback, and perceptions of summative assessment fairness? A quasi-experimental approach was adopted, and participants included 214 undergraduate business students from the United States (105) and South Korea (109). Participants engaged in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test as a learning task, with data collected on attention, self-assessments, fairness perceptions, self-construals, and self-esteem. Results indicate that increasingly independent self-construals are associated with greater attention to temporal-comparative feedback relative to social-comparative feedback, and self-construals positively moderate relationships between comparative feedback and self-assessments of performance. Additionally, mixed comparative feedback is negatively associated with subsequent learning task performance, while consistently negative comparative feedback is positively associated with subsequent performance. Self-construals do not moderate feedback-performance relationships. The thesis does not find direct relationships between self-construals and general perceptions of fairness in different procedures for summative assessments. However, there is an interaction between self-construals and self-esteem as they relate to perceptions of summative assessment outcome fairness. Collectively, these results illustrate that learner self-construals act as an important construct in learner perceptions of, and responses to, formative and summative assessments.