Research Digest: What Does Science Have to Say About Feedback?

Using Red Font Influences the Emotional Perception of Critical Performance Feedback

Bertrams, Alex Althaus, Lea Boss, Tina Furrer, Patricia Jegher, Ladina C. Soszynska, Paulina Tschumi, Vinzenz (2019)

The participants’ subsequent evaluation of the feedback revealed that using red in the feedback caused the feedback to be perceived as relatively less emotionally positive.

Using a red font indirectly had an adverse effect on the cognitive feedback perception, mediated via the emotional feedback perception.

Big Take-Away: Be cautious with that red pen when giving feedback!

I do not need feedback! Or do I? Self-efficacy, perspective taking, and feedback seeking.

Sherf, Elad N. & Morrison, Elizabeth W. (2019)

...the relationship between self-efficacy and feedback seeking depends on the extent to which one engages in perspective taking.

In the absence of perspective taking, self-efficacy tends to be more negatively related to feedback seeking.

Big Take-Away: When people believe that they are competent at something, they are less likely to seek feedback. But when they engage in perspective taking, they become more likely to seek feedback, even if they feel confident int he topic.

Effects of elaborate feedback during practice tests: Costs and benefits of retrieval prompts.

van den Broek, G. S. E., Segers, E., van Rijn, H., Takashima, A., & Verhoeven, L. (2019)

Overall, hints feedback was not preferable over show-answer feedback. The common notion that hints are beneficial may not hold when the total practice time is limited.

Big Take-Away: When practicing recall, giving hints is no better than just giving the answer.

Test feedback and learning: Student preferences and perceived influence.

Smith, A. C., Ralph, B. C. W., MacLeod, C. M., & Smilek, D. (2019)

Following a recall quiz, student were provided with:

"(a) no feedback,

(b) correct response feedback only, or

Elaborative feedback was preferred over feedback containing only the correct response, and both were preferred over receiving no feedback...[participants] even reported that they found receiving no feedback harmful to their learning.

Big Take-Away: Assessments with no feedback might have detrimental effects on student engagement and elaborative feedback is generally preferred by students.

Comments

Back-to-School: Consider Your Feedback System, Not Grading System

One question I ask other teachers is “How important is feedback in learning?” Every teacher I talk to agrees that feedback is crucial. It’s how both teacher and student gets better. Research backs the importance of feedback; building off of John Hattie’s work comparing factors on learning, Evidence for Learning’s toolkit ranks feedback as having the highest impact out of their 34 approaches (along with meta-cognition) with a +8 months’ impact on students’ learning progress. I follow the feedback question with “How important are grades in learning?” It might seem like a loaded question. You can imagine how teachers respond: “They’re not.” Why give grades, then? We’ll save that topic for another occasion. For now, I just want to point out that we are frequently asked to consider and describe our grading system by students, parents, colleagues, and administrators. We’re rarely asked about the much bigger and more important component of our work: feedback. With back-to-school qu

A Culture of Iteration: Policies and Practices for a Revision-FocusedClassroom

Success in the real world depends on a person's ability to iterate. to understand the definition of success on a task to seek feedback early and often to use that feedback to revise and refine until successful As teachers, its our job to scaffold this process, with developmentally-appropriate differentiation, until our students can fly solo. As I sit here writing this, my SO Dan is at his desk red-lining a building diagram for a warehouse in Canada. When he's done, the diagram will go back to his team of engineers where they will respond to Dan's feedback with a better design. They'll repeat this process until both building code and client requirements have been met. To do this work, which requires an iteration cycle that can last over a year or more, Dan has to understand building code and client needs, seek feedback from other engineers and the client, and use that feedback to revise and refine until the design is ready for implementation. Dan wasn'

Part 2 - Tools for an Equitable Feedback System: Engaging with Criteria

This series of posts will cover a variety of bite-sized strategies that can be incorporated into a more holistic feedback system. To learn more about the research behind these approaches, we recommend you first read our white paper . Part 1 - Feedback is Emotional For feedback information to be useful, it must communicate: Where am I going? (What are the goals?) How am I going? (What progress is being made toward the goal?) Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?) (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). Supporting students in engaging with the grading criteria helps give context to the feedback to come. In other words, it does the groundwork of helping them determine for themselves, "Where am I going?"

The Feedback Loop

Search This Blog