Although feedback is often mentioned in many articles, only a few recent studies have systematically investigated the meaning of feedback in classrooms.
While navigating through my colleague’s blog (Luigi), I found his post “The Power of Feedback” very interesting for me.
According to Hattie & Timperley (2007), “feedback is conceptualized as information provided by an agent (e.g., teacher, peer, book, parent, self, experience) regarding aspects of one’s performance or understanding. A teacher or parent can provide corrective information, a peer can provide an alternative strategy, a book can provide information to clarify ideas, a parent can encourage, and a learner can look up the answer to evaluate the correctness of a response. Feedback thus is a “consequence” of performance.”
Back to the days as a school or undergraduate student, feedback was only a number out of the total mark plus a simple statement either “well done”, “bravo” or “do it again”.
As a newbie educator, my head of department’s instructions on giving feedback to the students seemed extra work and an overwhelming task for me.
By that time, I noticed the power of feedback on my students’ achievements and their learning experience. However, the distinction between providing instruction and providing feedback was not clear for me.
That leaded me to understand that feedback needs to provide information specifically relating to the task or process of learning that fills a gap between what is understood and what is aimed to be understood, “the process itself takes on the forms of new instruction, rather than informing the student solely about correctness” (Kulhavy, 1977).
Last trimester in the EDU11119 module in the BOE, I experienced a new learning experience in academic writing, and for me, it was very stressful at the beginning, as for an engineering graduate and a math teacher I am not used to academic writing or even any writing (only numbers, equations, and problem-solving skills). For me – as a student – I was striving for feedback to help me or at least provide a vision on my next step to improve my work or to gain enough knowledge to even pass the module, however, the feedback (which followed the sandwich strategy) did not include any further steps or any vision on how to improve or achieve the learning outcome.
From that moment, I realised the importance and the power of feedback and its effect on the student’s learning experience.
Winne and Butler (1994) provided an excellent summary in their claim that “feedback is information with which a learner can confirm, add to, overwrite, tune, or restructure information in memory, whether that information is domain knowledge, metacognitive knowledge, beliefs about self and tasks, or cognitive tactics and strategies”.
Hattie & Timperley (2007) argues that “Effective feedback must answer three major questions asked by a teacher and/or by a student: Where am I going? (What are the goals?), How am I going? (What progress is being made toward the goal?), and Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?) These questions correspond to notions of feed up, feedback, and feedforward”.
From that, I planned to change the structure of my feedback levels to my students as:
- Feedback about a task or product stated whether the work done is either correct or incorrect.
- Feedback aimed at the process used to create a product or complete a task.
- Feedback focused on the self-regulation level, including self-evaluation or confidence to engage further on a task.
- Feedback directed to the “self,” which is unrelated to performance on the task.
With this in mind, giving the students the chance and the anonymity space to feedback the teacher and their peers will make feedback a two-way response to help both students and teacher to improve.
Finally, feedback, however, is not “the answer”; rather, it is but one powerful answer. With inefficient learners, a teacher should provide elaborations through instruction than provide feedback on poorly understood concepts. If feedback is directed at the right level, it can assist students to comprehend, engage, or develop effective strategies to process the information intended to be learned.
References:
Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81–112. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430298487
https://luigilaspada.wordpress.com/blog/
Kulhavy, R. W. (1977). Feedback in Written Instruction. Review of Educational Research, 47(2), 211–232. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543047002211
Winne, P. H., & Butler, D. L. (1994). Student cognition in learning from teaching. In T. Husen & T. Postlewaite (Eds.), International encyclopaedia of education (2nd ed., pp. 5738–5745). Oxford, UK: Pergamon.
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