Investigating Pre-service Teachers' Utilization of Written Feedback in Mathematics: A Basis for Designing Student-centered Classrooms in Local Colleges and Universities

Written feedback plays a very important role in the teaching and learning process of pre-service teachers, because it allows students to reflect on their learning and clearly see their areas of improvement. Given this established importance of feedback in education, limited research has examined how pre-service teachers utilize feedback and its association with mindset orientation and feedback perception, particularly in the context of mathematics education. This convergent parallel mixed-methods study examined associations among pre-service teachers’ mindset beliefs, perceptions of written feedback, and feedback utilization in mathematics at a local college in the Philippines. Quantitative data were gathered from an adapted mindset survey and pre-service teachers’ resubmission behaviors and were analyzed with the chi-square test of independence; qualitative results from semi-structured interviews underwent thematic analysis, and findings were integrated with the quantitative findings through triangulation. Results indicated that growth mindset was associated with student-centered feedback perception (χ²=6.18, p=.013) and with greater feedback utilization (χ²=8.27, p=.004), while feedback perception and feedback utilization were not significantly associated (χ²=0.49, p=.483). Qualitative themes showed how growth-oriented beliefs and student-centered feedback perception supported pre-service teachers’ feedback utilization. The findings indicated that integrating feedback literacy training and growth-oriented written feedback practices, such as the SE2R model, into teacher-education coursework may strengthen pre-service teachers’ capacity to interpret feedback, act on it during revision, and apply student-centered feedback routines in mathematics classrooms. Keywords: pre-service teachers, written feedback, mindset beliefs, student-centered learning, mathematics education, feedback utilization