The information students receive from teachers and peers about their performance on learning tasks can serve many different purposes. To be useful to students, it must be presented in a comprehensible manner and it must be timely. Feedback linked to specific criteria helps students adjust their performance based on the selected criteria, as well.
Three Purposes
An ideal learning environment includes feedback that addresses three basic questions, according to Hattie and Timperley (2007). These questions relate to the purpose of the feedback and can guide teachers in providing information that effectively helps students more precisely understand a concept or expand their notion of it.
"Where Am I Going"
Feedback that relates to instructional goals and assists students to understand when they have attained those goals helps them know where they are going as learners. Because feedback helps students close the distance between their current level of performance and desired performance, goals should be clear. Feedback can take many forms.
A test score can provide feedback about whether students have attained a particular learning goal, for example. Written or oral commentary that describes a degree of attainment or level of performance helps students know what the goal is and whether the goal is achieved. Difficult aspects related to learning goals lie in defining the goals, making them clear to students, and increasing the level of difficulty or sophistication such that learning continually occurs.
"How Am I Going"
Feedback that helps students adjust their learning as they work on a task, behavior, or learning process serves the purpose of helping students answer, “How am I going?” For complex learning, students typically need guidance as they work toward a learning goal. Teachers are sometimes frustrated when they have provided comprehensive feedback to students on a large project, such as an essay or science experiment, after the task is complete.
Students often discard such feedback because by the time it is provided, there is no opportunity to adjust the performance. If is for this reason that teachers can increase student achievement and performance if complex learning tasks are completed, at least in part, in the classroom. Only there can the teacher provide feedback that helps students adjust their work before it is complete.
Where to Next?
Some feedback helps students connect their learning to new challenges and increased proficiency. Care must be taken that students are not simply given more work to help them learn what is next. The focus here should be on what students can learn. Consider these two interactions:
Focus on more work:
- Student: I just finished reading Night, by Elie Wiesel.
- Teacher: Excellent. Why don’t you write an essay about this memoir and compare Night to what you learned from reading the textbook chapter about the Holocaust?
Focus on learning:
- Student: I just finished reading Night, by Elie Wiesel.
- Teacher: That’s good news! Do you remember our virtual trip to the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum? Tell me a bit about what you saw there that helped you understand this memoir a bit better.
In the second scenario, the teacher invites a conversation and connects one learning task (reading Night) to another (virtual tour of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum). Thoughtful feedback that helps students understand where they are going and what they are going to learn can be coupled with feedback that helps students adjust their learning as they make progress toward those goals. In addition, feedback can help expand student understanding, make new connections, and encourage learning without introducing additional work students might view negatively.
For further reading: Feedback on Student Work and Feedback on Student Work Builds Relationships
References:
Hattie, J. & Timperley, H. "The power of feedback." Review of Educational Research, vol 77(1), 81-112, 2007. Doi: 10.3102/003465430298487
Wiesel, E. Night. New York: Bantam Books, 1960.
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