In 1998, Black and Wiliam used the term the black box to illustrate how little was known about what happens in classrooms. Their review spawned a great deal of research on formative assessment, including strategies for giving feedback to students. More recently, scholars in the field of classroom assessment and measurement have expressed the need for research on how students understand, interpret, and process feedback. I call this the new black box.

This study shifts the focus from feedback as something that is given to something that is received. It does so by: (1) conceptualizing students’ responses to feedback in measurable ways, (2) developing and validating a Responses to Feedback (RtF) survey, and (3) examining the relationships among motivational states, responses to feedback, and characteristics of feedback.

Survey data were collected from 93 7^th grade ELA students; think aloud data were collected from six of these students. There was acceptable validity evidence regarding test content, response processes, convergent validity, and reliability for the RtF survey. Results suggest that not all students might have considered checklist as a form of feedback. They tended to have positive emotions and judgments in response to their teacher’s feedback and tended to make controllable attributions. They generally made informative meaning and constructive decisions about next steps. Correlational findings showed that (1) emotions, judgments, meaning making, and attributions are related; (2) task interest was the only motivation variable related to responses to feedback, and (3) task interest and judgments about the feedback related to the decisions students made about next steps. Implications about cultivating an assessment culture is discussed.