THE GROWING MIND BY DR. KAREN SUMNER
THE REMARKABLE
POWER OF FEEDBACK
Imagine what could happen if you knew the most effective method for helping your child achieve improved understanding and performance in school. Then imagine what could happen if that approach was so simple you could start using it right away.
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:.( Your child comes home feeling discouraged and de-energized. She flopped on a math quiz and is worried about the big test coming up. She is having negative thoughts about her ability and is not motivated to prepare for the test. She feels lousy and doesn’t think she can improve. Why study? She’ll just bomb anyway.
:.) Your child comes home full of energy and plans. Though she struggled on a math quiz, she’s not feeling defeated or overwhelmed. She spends the night reviewing her quiz and doing more practice questions. It’s not easy work, and she may not ace the test, but she’s feeling good about “getting it.” And she can actually see herself improving. What’s the difference between these two hypothetical students?
The second student was given quality feedback after her disappointing quiz. She received written comments about steps she had missed and strategies she can use to improve. Then, her teacher checked in with her to see if she understood the feedback and answered any additional questions. The student had the information she needed to do better next time. And she had hope. The Elements of Quality Feedback What exactly is quality feedback? It’s information provided to a student, in clear and precise detail, about what she can do to improve her understanding and performance in order to meet the learning goals. In an extensive meta-analysis of educational approaches that combined hundreds of individual research studies so as to eliminate data outliers and errors, feedback ranked first in the effect on student achievement. Students
who receive quality feedback achieve eight months of additional progress in understanding and performance compared to the progress they would make in a school year with poor quality feedback. That is a massive gain in achievement! Feedback is no magic pill – it requires substantial effort on the part of both the teacher and student – but the learning gains are stunning. So what kind of feedback is quality feedback? Researchers divide feedback into four categories, with only the first three having a positive impact on student learning: 1. Information about the learning task or product 2. Information about the learning process 3. Information about the student’s management of their learning 4. Information about the student as an individual The first type of feedback gives students information about what they have produced: “Your thesis statement makes three separate claims but you only provided evidence for two claims in the essay.” The second type offers comments on the process: “Because you did not make the revisions suggested by your peer editor, you missed key opportunities to improve your argument.” The third type helps a student to think about herself as a learner: “You sometimes rush through your edits and miss opportunities to refine your work. Pause after each page to check in with me or a friend on what you’ve seen and missed.” The fourth type of feedback, which is not effective in supporting learning, is commentary on the person as an individual: “You’re a talented (continued on page 12)
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THE GROWING MIND
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Quality feedback sends the message that effort yields progress, which creates a positive loop of persistence and achievement. It motivates and inspires.
(continued from page 11) student of English!” This kind of comment does not lead to achievement gains and can even be detrimental to learning. We all know that negative personal comments are damaging – “You’re a lousy student of English!” – but saying nice things about a kid can be harmful as well. Nice personal comments are forms of praise, and ample research shows that praise actually hurts perseverance and performance. It generally contains no task, process or learning information and has been found to undermine motivation and effort. Kids who are praised become underperformers who are afraid of hard work, risk-averse and fearful of coming across as stupid. Praise is not quality feedback. The first three types of feedback emphasize effort, not talent. They focus on the product, the process or the learning habits and indicate how exactly each can be amended. They make improvement both visible and possible, which builds self-confidence. They help students believe in their ability to learn, which is far more important than believing that they are 12
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“smart” or “good at” a specific subject. Quality feedback sends the message that effort yields progress, which creates a positive loop of persistence and achievement. It motivates and inspires.
Teachers Are Learners Too Guess what? Teachers are constantly learning and need feedback as much as students. In fact, they benefit from feedback from students. Teachers support student achievement when they gather feedback about the learning process from students every day: checking in, pausing to listen, engaging
students in short conversations, and then – most important of all – adjusting their lessons as a result. Teachers need to know which of their approaches and strategies are working and which are not. This powerful form of feedback comes from the student to the teacher who reflects on it and acts on it in order to improve student achievement. Another form of effective feedback about teaching is to survey students about their experiences in the classroom. Students see their teachers more often than anyone else, and they are a wealth of information. Numerous studies have confirmed that children can offer valuable
feedback about teaching, including Harvard’s Kennedy School which has illustrated that student survey responses are valid and reliable. Students know good teaching, and student feedback on surveys – if used to improve teaching – raises student achievement. What do the best classrooms look like, according to students? Here’s the summary: “respectful and orderly environments, with students who stay busy and learn to correct their mistakes from a teacher who explains difficult things clearly.” This is an accurate description of the qualities of a high-achieving classroom. Kids know what they’re talking about.
EDUCATIONAL APPROACHES AND STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT The chart below offers a handful of learning interventions and a rating of their impact on student achievement. Here is how the Educational Endowment Fund describes the impact ratings: “Average impact is estimated in terms of the additional months’ progress you might expect pupils to make as a result of an approach being used in school, taking average pupil progress over a year as a benchmark. “For example… improving the quality feedback provided to pupils has an average impact of eight months. This means that pupils in a class where high quality feedback is provided will make on average eight months more progress over the course of a year compared to another class of pupils who were performing at the same level at the start of the year.” AVERAGE IMPACT ON EDUCATIONAL APPROACH
What Can Parents Do? We parents are perfectly capable of giving our kids quality feedback, though we may need to drop a few habits. Number one on the list to leave behind? Praise. Wrongly believing that praise develops motivation and self-esteem, we live in a culture of over-praising. “You’re great at guitar” is miles behind “sounds like you’re working hard at getting that chord right” when it comes to helping our kids see effort as the key to learning. Alternately, when we tell our kids that they’re smart or talented, they begin to view anything that requires effort as evidence that they’re not. We don’t want our kids to avoid challenge. We don’t want underperformers who are afraid of hard work and expect success to arrive without effort. We don’t want kids whose self-concept comes from being “smart” and who worry every day about losing their special edge. We don’t want risk-averse and fearful kids. And we don’t want kids who crave praise but suffer at its hands. When you want to encourage your kids, focus on effort and be specific. You may not have the content expertise of a teacher, but you can develop your child’s faith in herself as a learner. That is the remarkable power of quality feedback from both teachers and parents: kids who believe in themselves.
STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT
Feedback Information exchanged between student and teacher about the learner’s performance relative to learning goals – aligning effort and activity with the desired outcome
+ 8 months
Meta-Cognition and Self-Regulation Approaches that help students understand, evaluate and monitor their own learning, including habits, strengths and weaknesses
+ 8 months
Peer Tutoring Students working in pairs or small groups to provide each other with explicit teaching support, often by taking turns being the teacher and the learner
+ 6 months
Homework – Secondary School (average impact over Grades 7-12) Short and lesson-focused work is more effective than routinelyset homework, with homework that generates quality feedback being the most effective
+ 5 months
Collaborative Learning Students working in small groups on a shared task that has been clearly structured and well-designed
+ 5 months
Social and Emotional Learning Interventions that improve the social and emotional dimensions of learning rather than focusing on the academic or cognitive elements
+ 4 months
Digital Technology The use of technology to supplement classroom interactions and to support problem-solving or open-ended learning
+ 4 months
Behaviour Interventions Reducing challenging behaviour, such as aggression, violence, bullying, substance abuse and general anti-social activities
+ 4 months
Homework – Primary School (average impact over JK to Grade 6) Short and lesson-focused work on rare occasions rather than routinely-set homework, but there is limited value for achievement at this level
+ 1 month
Excerpted from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) Teaching and Learning Toolkit: http://educationendowmentfoundation.org
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