Toward An Understanding Of Feedback Seeking And The Feedback Mechanism In Social Learning

With the recent dramatic development of online learning via social media such as Facebook and Twitter,social learning has gained acceptance as an alternative to traditional learning.Despite the strengths of social learning in enabling flexible learning,it also has weaknesses due to the features of online social interactions.In online contexts,instructions from supervisors are lacking,learning interactions do not occur naturally,and information transmitted may be misunderstood.In this study,feedback was embraced as a strategy to deal with the effective ness of social learning.While a large amount of research has investigated the role of feedback,offering many insightful findings,there are some unsolved research gaps in these studies.Prior studies mostly took place in traditional contexts,and how feedback works in social learning was unexplored,leading to theoretical voids and research gaps.This dissertation takes the features of social learning into consideration and proposes two research questions related to feedback in social learning:how to get effective feedback and how feedback affects learning outcomes.To answer the two questions,two related studies were performed.Although superior in information searching,the lack of face-to-face meetings in social learning contexts makes it difficult for learning interactions to occur naturally.In study 1,it is proposed that feedback seeking is a good way to acquire effective feedback.The factors that influence learners,feedback seeking in social learning were investigated.Based on the relational communication theory,this study empirically examined the effects of perceived informational and relational value on feedback-seeking intention.Particularly,extending the social psychology perspective,personal-and social-level factors were identified as antecedents of perceived informational and relational value respectively.An online survey was conducted with 262 participants with online feedback-seeking experience to test ten hypotheses.The results showed that learners'perceived informational and relational value were affected by personal as well as social factors,which in turn influenced their intention to seek feedback.And feedback-seeking intention is positively related to feedback-seeking behavior.It is also found that accessibility of the feedback source is a strong predictor of feedback-seeking intention.Study 2 investigates how the feedback mechanism relates to creativity.In order to develop a good understanding of the relationship between feedback and creativity,two feedback dimensions were examined:evaluative feedback and informative feedback.Drawing on the social cognitive theory,this study unraveled the mechanisms through which feedback influenced individual creativity via perceived creative self-efficacy,intrinsic motivation,and perceived feedback accuracy.A laboratory experiment was conducted on a social learning platform with 125 subjects to test nine hypotheses.The findings indicate that the two dimensions of feedback---evaluative and informative-engender different levels of intrinsic motivation and perceived feedback accuracy,which in turn influence creative performance.Specifically,positive feedback elicits higher perceived creative self-efficacy,intrinsic motivation,and perceived feedback accuracy than negative feedback.And negative feedback interacts with informative feedback to affect intrinsic motivation and perceived feedback accuracy.These studies uncovered the factors that affect feedback seeking and the feedback mechanism that relates to creativity in social learning.This dissertation makes contributions to both theory and practice.In theoretical terms,this dissertation sheds light on the use of online technologies for feedback seeking,extends social cognitive theory to online learning contexts and identifies the relationships among feedback,motivational constructs,and creativity,and advances existing findings on feedback seeking and the feedback mechanism.In practical terms,this dissertation provides managers with ideas about how to manage social learning and feedback and foster creativity.Limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed at the end of this dissertation.