Self-doubt makes students watch for feedback, but hesitate to ask for it
Updated Aug 03, 2026
Students do not need to ignore feedback to disengage from it. Sometimes they read it carefully, worry about it, and still stop short of asking the question that would help them use it well. That is why Qiang Guo and Yueting Xu's Studies in Higher Education paper, "Exploring students’ feedback-seeking behavior: the roles of self-esteem, self-doubt, and achievement goals from a variable- and person-centered approach", matters for universities using student voice to improve assessment and feedback. For UK teams, the paper offers a practical distinction: students may still monitor feedback even when they do not feel confident enough to ask for it directly.
Context and research question
Universities often treat feedback engagement as a simple behavioural problem. If students are not attending feedback sessions, not asking follow-up questions, or not acting on comments, the explanation can quickly become that they are passive or uninterested. That reading is too thin. Students may avoid direct feedback-seeking because asking feels exposing, awkward, or risky, especially when their confidence is already fragile.
Guo and Xu examine that problem by focusing on the motivational side of feedback-seeking behaviour. Using data from 1,232 undergraduates, they explored how self-esteem and self-doubt relate to feedback-seeking, and how achievement goals mediate those relationships. The paper also uses a person-centred analysis to identify recurring student profiles rather than treating all students as one average group. For UK higher education teams, that makes the study useful because it shifts attention from "are students engaging with feedback?" to "what makes engagement feel safe or unsafe in the first place?"
Key findings
The clearest finding is that self-esteem and self-doubt do not affect all feedback-seeking in the same way. Students with stronger self-esteem were more likely to engage in both monitoring and inquiry. Self-doubt worked differently: it was linked to monitoring, but not to direct asking. In practice, that means some students stay highly alert to feedback signals while still avoiding the more exposed step of asking a tutor for clarification or more detail.
The abstract states the contrast neatly:
"self-esteem positively predicted both monitoring and inquiry, whereas self-doubt was positively associated with monitoring but negatively associated with inquiry."
That distinction matters for universities because low visible follow-up does not necessarily mean low concern. Some students may be highly engaged cognitively, but still unwilling to seek interpersonal feedback in ways staff can see.
Mastery goals appear to be an important bridge between students' internal state and their feedback behaviour. The study found that mastery goals mediated the relationships between self-esteem and self-doubt with both monitoring and inquiry. That suggests students are more likely to seek feedback proactively when they see it as part of improving their work, not simply as a judgement on their ability. For assessment and feedback leads, the implication is practical: feedback systems work differently when students experience them as developmental rather than evaluative.
Performance goals mattered more for direct inquiry than for quieter forms of monitoring. According to the study, performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals mediated the relationship between self-esteem, self-doubt, and inquiry only. That is useful because it suggests direct feedback-seeking is more exposed to worries about competence, impression, and judgement. Asking for more help is not only an academic act. It is also a social one.
The person-centred results are just as important as the average effects. More than half of the participants fell into a profile marked by low self-esteem and mastery goals, alongside high self-doubt. For institutions, that is the operational warning. Reluctance to seek feedback directly may not be a marginal issue affecting a small minority. It may describe a substantial part of the student population, especially where assessment cultures feel high stakes or impersonal.
Practical implications
For UK universities, the first implication is to stop treating feedback silence as indifference. If students monitor feedback but avoid inquiry, then a quiet cohort may still be a worried cohort. Module evaluations and pulse surveys should therefore ask not only whether feedback was useful, but whether students felt able to ask follow-up questions without embarrassment or risk. That gives teams a better read on feedback culture, not just feedback volume.
Second, universities should create lower-risk routes into follow-up. Directly approaching a lecturer can feel difficult, especially after a disappointing mark or where students already doubt their academic standing. Practical alternatives include short post-assessment debriefs, structured question prompts, optional feedback clinics, and anonymous or semi-anonymous routes for clarifying common issues. This aligns with evidence that students judge feedback comments as fairer when they are usable, because usability includes being able to act on the comment without having to cross a confidence barrier alone. The benefit is more equitable feedback uptake across the cohort.
Third, institutions should analyse open-text comments for confidence and approachability signals, not only for content complaints. Students often describe feedback as vague, harsh, generic, rushed, or hard to follow, but they also describe whether staff felt approachable and whether asking for more would have been comfortable. Using a structured approach such as the NSS open-text analysis methodology helps universities separate issues of clarity from issues of psychological safety, which leads to better-targeted action.
The broader lesson is that feedback engagement is partly a design problem, not just a student motivation problem. If direct inquiry is the step most exposed to self-doubt, then institutions should design assessment and feedback processes that reduce unnecessary social risk. That helps more students turn feedback into improvement, rather than leaving the benefits of feedback to those already confident enough to ask.
FAQ
Q: How can a university reduce the gap between students reading feedback and students asking for more help?
A: Start by making follow-up feel normal and low stakes. Build in short debrief opportunities after major assessments, offer clear prompts students can use when seeking clarification, and let staff address common misunderstandings in groups rather than relying only on one-to-one requests. Universities should also review whether students see staff as approachable in the first place, because that is often the real barrier behind low inquiry.
Q: What are the methodological limits of this study?
A: This paper is useful because it combines a large undergraduate sample with both variable-centred and person-centred analysis, but it still focuses on motivational relationships rather than institutional causality. It helps explain why students may seek feedback differently; it does not prove that one intervention will fix the problem in every context. UK teams should therefore use it as a strong interpretive lens, then test the same questions in local feedback and survey data.
Q: What does this change about student voice work on assessment and feedback?
A: It suggests universities should listen for hesitancy as well as dissatisfaction. If open comments repeatedly mention unclear wording, intimidating staff responses, or uncertainty about how to ask for more, those are not minor service issues. They are signs that the feedback system may favour already confident students. A governance-minded review of feedback comments, using something like the student comment analysis governance checklist, helps institutions turn those signals into a clearer improvement plan.
References
[Paper Source]: Qiang Guo, Yueting Xu "Exploring students’ feedback-seeking behavior: the roles of self-esteem, self-doubt, and achievement goals from a variable- and person-centered approach" DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2025.2612104
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