CHAPTER

1
What is feedback?

This chapter summarizes the key points about the nature and development of feed-
back thinking by educators and academics, laying the foundation for the related issues
to be explored throughout the rest of this book. The subsequent chapters are closely
tied to the life of a teacher and a student in the day to day structure of lessons, as
outlined in the introduction: culture, learning strategies, in lesson feedback and post-
lesson feedback. Practical examples, wherever possible, will bring the findings to life.
We have asked thousands of teachers to answer the following question in a
short sentence: What do you mean by feedback? These are typical of the ten main
explanations:

Comments – give comments on the way you are doing something

Clarification – answering student questions in class
Criticism – when you are given constructive criticism
Confirmation – when you are told you are doing it right
Content development – asking about the comment
Constructive reflection – giving someone positive and constructive
reflections on their work
Correction – showing what you did right or wrong, which helps you
Cons and pros – someone telling the pros and cons about your work
Commentary – they comment on my work
Criterion – relative to a standard

We have also asked as many students the same question, and by far the top
explanation of their list is: feedback helps me know where to go next. Oftentimes
when feedback is more about the above ten Cs, the students will claim that they
did not receive any feedback. Some direction, some ‘where to next?’ feedback
based on the ten Cs, however, is probably more powerful, as it helps defend the

1
What is feedback?

reasons for moving forward. A major focus in this book is ensuring there is ‘where
to next?’ feedback provided.

Some history . . . marking and grading

Not very long ago the word ‘feedback’ was rarely used. In the US, the term ‘grad-
ing’ covered what was then, and still often now, is assumed to be the most con-
ventional way of giving some kind of response to students about their work or
learning. In the UK and other countries, the term ‘marking’ was used to describe
grades, comments or both. The feedback in this form was mainly summative and
from teacher to student only. That isn’t to say that formative, oral, immediate, stu-
dent to teacher and student to student feedback wasn’t taking place, but it had not
been highlighted for its significance.
Marking and grading had come under fire in various studies. Ruth Butler’s
(1988) famous study, for instance, in which students were given either: a) grades,
b) comment only or c) grades and comments found that those in the com-
ment only groups had greater gains in progress (measured by test results) than
the other two groups. Wherever positive comments accompanied grades, inter-
views with students revealed that they ignored those comments in favor of the
grade and what it was telling them about their performance. They added that the
positive comments were the teacher’s way of cheering them up. Grades encour-
age students to develop ego-related mindsets rather than task-related mindsets.
Grades often tell the student ‘the work is over’. We must not confuse grading
with feedback.
As comment only feedback became more common, the next step was to make
sure it was specific enough to make a difference. The Office for Standards in Edu-
cation (Ofsted) (the schools’ inspection service) wrote to schools in England in
1996:

Marking is usually contentious but often fails to offer guidance on how

work can be improved. In a significant minority of cases, marking rein-
forces underachievement and under expectation by being too generous or
unfocused.

The essential message is that the most valuable feedback focuses on helping the stu-
dent improve. If the comments do not provide ‘where to next’ or ‘how to improve
this work’ information then grades might be the only worthwhile indicator; but
if grades are given with no other information, this might not lead to defensible
interpretation as to current or future improvements.
Teachers were generally giving grades, comments, or both, to students after les-
sons, and these were seen as the most important and expected form of feedback. It

2
 What is feedback?

was also discovered that most comments, unless they required a student response,
were often ignored by students if the feedback comments were given out with
no time allocated for students to read the comments, no chance to use them to
improve, or where they were illegible or hard to understand (e.g. Clarke, 2001).

Feedback: timing
Nuthall and Alton-Lee (1997) found that all students, regardless of their level of
achievement, typically need to be exposed to any new learning at least three to five
times before it has a high probability of being learned.

Our data does not support the notion that lower achievers need more instruc-
tion. The critical requirement is that all students get access to comparable
opportunities.
(Nuthall & Alton-Lee, 1997)

During the multiple opportunities for learning and engagement, teachers need
to provide feedback to refine the student’s understanding of the content. Teachers
need to plan for students’ misconceptions to be identified, explored and chal-
lenged, to make transparent the links with their prior experiences and to provide
multiple opportunities and scaffolding to make those links with new information:
the essence of effective feedback. Nuthall is quite emphatic that students do not
need merely repeated trials at tasks – there must be punctuating feedback. Doing
the same thing (making the same errors) repeatedly leads to overlearning the
wrong things. Neither should students have simply more experience of the same
teaching, but instead a variety of experiences and feedback over three to five
interactions.

Feedback: what matters

Hattie and Timperley (2007) defined feedback as relating to actions or information
provided by an agent (e.g. teacher, peer, book, parent, internet, experience) that
provides information regarding aspects of one’s performance or understanding.
Feedback is information about the task that fills a gap between what is under-
stood and what is aimed to be understood. It can lead to increased effort, motiva-
tion or engagement to reduce the discrepancy between the current status and the
goal; it can lead to alternative strategies to understand the material; it can confirm
for the student that they are correct or incorrect, or how far they have reached
the goal; it can indicate that more information is available or needed; it can point
to directions that the students could pursue; and finally it can lead to restructur-
ing understandings. Royce Sadler (1989) set the scene in his seminal paper by

3
What is feedback?

establishing the concept that feedback is information that ‘closes the gap’ between
where a student is and where the student needs to be:

The learner has to a) possess a concept of the standard (or goal or reference
level) being aimed for, b) compare the actual (or current) level of performance
with the standard, and c) engage in appropriate action which leads to some
closure of the gap.

Once ‘feedback’ entered the teaching vocabulary, the power of verbal, in-lesson
feedback between all parties and the place and quantity of post-lesson feedback
became, and remains, a key focus. The research findings made the scope of feed-
back something that could not be ignored.
Rather than general, meaningless comments as feedback to the student (e.g.‘Try
harder’), Terry Crooks revealed the most effective feedback content (2001):

The greatest motivational benefits will come from focusing feedback on:
■ the qualities of the child’s work, and not on comparison with other children,
■ specific ways in which the child’s work could be improved,
■ improvements that the child has made compared to his or her earlier work.

All this needs to be undertaken in a climate of high trust and reduced anxiety. The
issue of the attention paid to children’s self-efficacy and self-esteem and the use of
external rewards and other forms of extrinsic motivation was linked with types of
feedback:

Feedback is most effective when goals are specific and challenging but when
task complexity is low. Giving praise for completing a task appears to be inef-
fective. Feedback is more effective when there are perceived low rather than
high levels of threat to self-esteem.
(Kluger & DeNisi, 1996)

Getting underneath student understanding, finding out what they really think, is
the starting point of all feedback, from whichever direction, because only then can
the feedback be appropriately constructed to provide advice:

When I completed the first synthesis of 134 meta analyses of all possible influ-
ences on achievement (Hattie, 1992), it soon became clear that feedback was
among the most positive influences on achievement . . .The mistake I was mak-
ing was seeing feedback as something teachers provided to students. I discov-
ered that feedback is most powerful when it is from the student to the teacher.
What they know, what they understand, where they make errors, when they
have misconceptions, when they are not engaged – then teaching and learning

4
 What is feedback?

can be synchronized and powerful. Feedback to teachers makes learning visible.

(Feedback effect size 0.73)
(Hattie, 2012)

Feedback can have many functions: reinforcing success, correcting errors, helping
to unravel misconceptions, suggesting specific improvements, giving improvement
advice for the future, praising, punishing or rewarding, all with different levels of
effectiveness.Who gives the feedback, whether it is task or ego related, and how and
whether it is received and acted upon are all factors in its effectiveness. This last point
is particularly pertinent: more attention needs to be given to whether and how
students receive and act upon feedback, as there seems little point in maximizing
the amount and nature of feedback given if it is not received or understood.This is
why, throughout this book, we emphasize the interpretations that are made by the
receiver about the feedback, and how it helps them answer the question ‘Where to
next?’ or ‘How could this be improved?’
Feedback thrives on errors and misconceptions. It might seem pointless to
receive feedback about ‘where to next’ if our work is perfect, although in the case of
almost all learning, there can always be some improvement and, in any case, know-
ing where to next in terms of extending one’s learning is always valuable.The power
of feedback focused on error and misconceptions is further explored in Chapter 3.
Both positive and negative feedback can have beneficial effects on learning.The
untangling of these effects depends on the level at which the feedback is aimed and
processed and the interactions between the validity of the feedback and the self-
efficacy levels of students. In particular, negative feedback is more powerful at the
self-level, causing personal evaluation. Both types can be effective when feedback
is about the task, but there are differential effects relating to commitment, mastery
or performance orientation and self-efficacy.
That students are taught to receive, interpret and use the feedback
provided is probably much more important than focusing on how much
feedback is provided by the teacher, as feedback given but not heard is
of little use. Students, like adults, quickly learn to be selective listeners – feedback
often means more investment in improvement, repeating the work and putting
in more effort. Feedback can impact our beliefs about our work, our judgments
about quality and can have other costs. The art is turning these costs into benefits
in terms of deeper, worthwhile and valuable learning.
Finally, feedback needs to be combined with effective teaching and learning
strategies to have the greatest impact. Sometimes, re-teaching is more power-
ful than just providing feedback. Feedback alone is not the magic bullet, as we
describe in the following chapters:

■ The culture required to best enable effective feedback.

■ The types of teaching and learning strategies and techniques which form a
structure within which to create effective feedback opportunities.

5
What is feedback?

■ Examples and analysis of the different types of in-lesson feedback.

■ Examples and analysis of post-lesson feedback including to and from outside
school partners.

Having summarized what we know about feedback, it is important that we

acknowledge the fundamental problem – while feedback is powerful, it is also
among the most variable of influences. The same feedback in one situation might
be worthwhile, but in another situation of little value. Indeed, Kluger and DeNisi
(1996) noted that one third of feedback was negative in its impact! Understanding
this variability is critical, which is why simple claims about feedback are of low
value, a problem explored throughout this book.
The following graphic from ‘Coaching Teachers in the Power of Feedback’
(Figure 1.1), a resource used in a research project in Australia (Brooks, 2017), sum-
marizes the feedback cycle:

8 STEPS TOWARD FEEDBACK FOR LEARNING

8
Flows bi- Sparks
directionally learning 1
between
7 learners and
teachers
Flourishes
Promotes
in the right
students
environment
self-regulation
2

Clarifies for
6 Matches the Effective students
needs of the
learner Feedback where they
are going
Informs
Highlights the students
next steps for how they
3
improvement are going
5
4

© Copyright Showeet.com

Figure 1.1 Toward feedback for learning

6
 What is feedback?

Key points

■ Feedback is powerful but variable in its impact on learning.

■ Grades or comments with no focus on improvement might interfere with
learning.
■ Students prefer immediate feedback, but delayed feedback can be beneficial.
■ Prior knowledge is the starting point for feedback.
■ Feedback is about closing the gap between current and desired learning.
■ Goals should be specific and challenging, but task complexity low.
■ High self-efficacy and trust are needed for feedback to be effective.
■ Student to teacher feedback is more important than teacher to student.
■ Effective feedback occurs when it is received and acted upon.