Editorial
The landscape of education and…
by Chia Hui Ping
I signed up for the Assessment Colloquium and Workshop 1A with the same questions I had begun my teaching career with 14 years ago. Not because I had not grown in understanding since 2008; rather, it was because I continued to believe that the great and complex endeavour of human growth and learning resisted straightforward answers and I wished to test and stretch my practice and understanding. I had always experienced bemusement when teachers achieved great certainty and confidence in their knowledge of what works with learning, assessment and feedback, when the reality is that if the solutions are so clear-cut then why are the same challenges lamented about more than a decade ago still afflicting us teachers? True enough, when Professor Lipvenich invited participants to articulate our main challenges with instructional feedback early on in the workshop, the recurring difficulties were shared: “We don’t have enough time to provide quality feedback to so many students!” and “The students aren’t and/or are lacking the ability to implement feedback!”
That being said, the Padlet responses yielded the sense that though similar, the challenges teachers were experiencing with teaching learning through feedback were now somewhat different. The teachers’ conundrums were now layered with additional and more complex questions that had arisen due to both positive and still-unfolding developments in education: the healthily growing collective understanding of the integral role of feedback to learning as well as understandable skepticism over whether the accelerated use of educational technology, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, was truly more boon than bane. Teachers were now concerned with “How else might we provide even more effective feedback?” and “Are there new discoveries on what really moves the needle in learning with feedback?”—these questions had been on my mind too. It was almost paradoxical that teachers’ queries about feedback had somehow leap-frogged ahead in sophistication while many of us still grappled with the basic issues of completing the giving of feedback and supporting students with processing it. Could there be way of addressing both sets of questions: basic and complex, together? Could we provide really effective feedback even with the very real constraints of time and being outnumbered by large classes of students, each with varying needs and readiness levels to support?
The Whys of Feedback – Duh! but not Duh!
The above questions by Professor Lipnevich provided me with a good start: she brought all of us back to the first principles of feedback through questions. Given that feedback is everywhere in the real-world—in the wisdom parents share with children, in heart-to-heart talks friends have with each other, in discussions colleagues strike up to move work forward—what exactly is feedback in school and life for, and what are the common conditions across relational and situational contexts that enable feedback to do its intended work?
I was reminded that before teachers and students alike ponder the whens, wheres, whos, whats and hows of learning with effective feedback, we had to be clearer about its whys. Firstly, there can be no learning, instruction nor positive transformation, sans feedback. Secondly, feedback for and of learning is a conversation and two-way exchange to yield growth and development—between instructors and learners, parents and children, friends, and between human beings and how they shape their environment and vice versa. Hence, the purpose of instructional feedback in the context of schools should be, in many ways, an extension of, or mediator of, the kinds of feedback children receive from their family and sociocultural environment, and it should be preparation for the world of feedback in adulthood and work.
Necessarily, and almost intuitively, I recalled that for feedback in schools to fulfill its purpose of preparing students for life beyond the classroom, it had to be authentic and learners needed to be slowly but surely equipped with the tools to receive feedback, understand it with both affective and cognitive skills, to translate that feedback into actionable improvements that they desired for themselves and others (see Slide 11 above which outlines a definition for such instructional feedback). I was reminded that the business of effective feedback was thus inherently complex in spite of our best efforts to seek silver bullets to reduce and mitigate the challenge factors of feedback. However, did that mean that good feedback to nurture self-directed and flourishing individuals who could better themselves and their communities was impracticable and unattainable in the classroom? Might there be ways to simplify the difficulties we experience (and sometimes create for ourselves) in our feedback practices with our students? Professor Lipnevich’s explanation of the Student-Feedback Interaction Model (see Slide 12 below) was illuminating in its findings on what could actually work and not, and also reassuring in its reminders about enduring truths about feedback.
The Whens, Wheres and Whos of Feedback – What actually matters?
Most of us would have, at some point, been introduced to the notion that “faster is better” when it comes to feedback. This makes intuitive sense: the sooner (even better, more immediately) we support students in closing the feedback loop, the stronger the effects and impact on their learning. In life and at work, when someone does something well or acts out of line, we affirm or address the behaviour as soon as possible. Teachers all over the world thus exhort each other and exhaust themselves therein, trying to mark, grade and return student work quickly in well-meaning efforts to boost student learning.
However, is being a hare necessarily better than being more tortoise-like in providing feedback? At one point of the workshop, Professor Lipnevich shared the findings published in 2019 by Emily R. Fyfe, Robert L. Goldstone, Paulo Carvalho and Tracey Carbonetto[1] to an audience reaction that spanned emotions ranging from shock, surprise, relief to euphoria. The findings of the multi-level, large-scale study were as follows, with my emphases included:
“Across 38 classes, the overall estimate for the effect of feedback timing was 0.002 … which indicates that there was no effect of immediate feedback compared with delayed feedback on student learning that generali[s]es across classes. Furthermore, there were no credibly non-zero effects for 40 pre-registered moderators related to class-level and student-level characteristics. Yet our results provide hints that in certain kinds of classes, which were undersampled in the current study, there may be modest advantages for delayed feedback.”[2]
“However, recent arguments and data suggest that the benefits of immediate feedback may be limited to specific outcomes (e.g., speed of acquisition) and that delayed feedback may be optimal for knowledge retention (e.g., Mullet et al., 2014). Researchers in a recent report claimed to outline three key findings from the feedback literature that are “robust, well-replicated, and critical to understanding how people learn,” and one was that “delaying feedback produces better learning and retention” than immediate feedback (Butler & Woodward, 2018, p. 23). Among the argued benefits of delayed feedback is that it provides spaced study (students study the content when they complete the assignment and when they receive feedback after a delay). Given the opposing nature of these recommendations, research is urgently needed to investigate the timing of feedback and the generali[s]ability of the effects of immediate feedback on student learning outcomes across a variety of authentic classroom contexts.”[3]
The initial surprise, relief and euphoria I experienced was thus moderated. It is not plainly true that feedback works best when it is delivered as soon as possible, nor is “wait for it” always helpful in supporting students’ learning with feedback. The proverbial “it depends” applies to the whens of delivering feedback and hinges on the context and intended outcomes the feedback-giver hopes to actualise for the feedback-receiver. To illustrate, consider these 4 scenarios in weighing whether it would be better to provide feedback immediately or with a delay:
Feedback Scenario in School (1)
Students write an essay after the teaching and learning of the elements of good writing has taken place, including (a) analysing a range of diverse samples of good writing, (b) identifying their strengths and areas for growth in relation to success criteria, and (c) students thereafter setting writing goals for themselves and explaining how they would actualise these goals in their essay task.
Post-essay, the teacher gives students 1 week to reflect, with annotations on their essay, their assessment of whether they had achieved their goals, how so and where in their essay, and how do they know. This self-generated feedback may be done immediately after school or in a few days (as long as it is within a week).
Some students choose to complete their self-generated feedback the day itself (while the memory of realisations they had, during and shortly after essay-writing, is still fresh in their minds). Some students opt to do it later in the week when they have more time.
Students submit their annotated essays to the teacher by the deadline. The teacher benefits from being able to observe students’ diagnoses of their own writing based on their self-generated feedback. The teacher’s feedback thus focuses on responding to students’ evaluation of their own work and highlighting one area for growth they have not identified through a question posed. Because the teacher’s feedback is scoped by students’ reflections, it is targeted and the teacher is able to provide feedback on the many student essays 2.5 weeks after the annotated essays are submitted (that is, 3.5 weeks after the students write their essay).
Feedback Scenario in School (2)
Students will be learning two sets of mathematical concepts and operations, with one being foundational to the other. The teacher has 3 weeks to help students master both sets of concepts and operations. To ascertain if students are ready to move from learning one set to the other, the teacher administers a short quiz to facilitate assessment of learning. This short quiz is graded quickly after the first week of teaching and returned to students with feedback within the second week. To close the lesson wherein the feedback is discussed with students, the teacher invites students to write an exit pass to review and consolidate their learning.
Some students with lower motivation levels do not complete this exit pass.
The teacher can decide to collect and scan through the exit passes, or not, depending on his or her available time.
Feedback Scenario in the Workplace (1)
A colleague who is overseeing a few projects is spread thin and makes hasty decisions, prioritising expedience over efficacy. You wish to give him or her feedback to improve overall outcomes but you are uncertain if he or she is in the right emotional and mental space to take in the feedback. You are also unsure if the feedback is really consequential: while your colleague’s decisions are expedient, the overall quality of outcomes does not pale too much in comparison to the effective ones.
You are sure that at some point, though, the feedback will be helpful to and appreciated by your colleague.
Feedback Scenario in the Workplace (2)
You are working on a long-haul and multi-part project and determine that for coherence in the final product, it would be better if team members provide each other with immediate feedback once each aspect of the project is completed. This ensures that improvements to the project can be made sooner, and also with the benefit of prompt and accurate action after team feedback discussions. Keeping with the longer-term timeline would be sensible but also entail more delayed feedback. Your team is of the view that it is better to contract the timeline slightly so that each step of the process can be acted on more immediately to guide the next parts of the project.
The response of “it depends” to the question of when—and where— feedback is best placed would be liberating to some teachers. Freed of the spectre of needing to turn around feedback for a large body of student work within 2- to 3-week periods, teachers may rest easy knowing that deferments, if any, to comments on long essays, for example, will not really affect students’ ability to benefit from feedback and learn well. That said, should feedback on prior learning be essential in moving learners to more advanced stages of learning (as is the case for some Mathematics learning), or if feedback must be delivered at a certain juncture to enable students to act on the feedback to actualise improvements in their next task, then necessarily, the delivery of feedback becomes more time-sensitive. Fundamentally, efficacious timing and placement of feedback can be reframed as a teacher’s judgement call on what would be most timely and appropriate given the context of students’ learning and their learner profiles. These judgement calls should consider: (a) the type of learning and/or assessment process or task taking place, (b) the kind of feedback learners would benefit most from at different stages of their learning trajectory (that is, would it be self-, peer-, or teacher-provided feedback, and/or feedback pre-, during-, or post-task), and (c) how learners may be best supported in their opportunity to feed their learning from the feedback forward through a transfer task.
Indeed, thinking of effective formative feedback as requiring different strokes for different folks’ varied work requires a “mindset change” (see Slide 31 below). It requires us to view learning tasks as points along a longer-tern continuum—all preparing learners for the changes they could effect in their future lives—rather than as summative ends in themselves.
The preceding considerations on the whens and wheres of effective feedback would be a lot more straightforward if the diversity of whos—feedback sources and recipients—were not in the mix. But they inescapably are, and are fundamentally and ultimately important because feedback loses its telos if it does not result in positive growth for those in the feedback loop, and healthy development in that which the feedback is intended to serve, for example, change for a community. With the emergence of new sources of feedback, such as computers and artificial intelligence (AI), people are no longer the sole feedback providers, adding further diversity to an already-variegated range of message-styles amongst human feedback providers (see Slide 22 that outlines common sources of feedback and the various aspects of a feedback message to learners). Is the neutrality and purported unbiased objectivity of computer- and AI-generated feedback necessarily valued and trusted more by feedback receivers, such as students? Yes and no, because for certain task-types, for example, short answer questions, computer programmes and AI have evolved to a point where the feedback they provide is little different from that of a human’s; however, the answer is less clear on whether machine learning has developed to a point where the same can be said for complex problem-solving or tasks.
Additionally, there is much to be said about the human touch in feedback beyond its emotional valence. Professor Lipnevich shared findings that highlighted that students still prefer and privilege feedback emanating from a human instructor, such as a teacher, rather than that from a computer or peer. They also experienced better performance outcomes when they believed that the source of feedback was a human instructor (see Slide 37 above). I had mixed feelings about these findings because zealous teachers might feel even more responsible for their students’ learning and performance, and students already disinclined to seek feedback from anyone else but an expert or authority figure would be further fueled to regard other sources of feedback, such as peers, with skepticism. Thankfully, Professor Lipnevich preempted such audience sentiments and remarked that peers are an under-used and important resource for feedback in schools. This resonated, along with her elaboration that peers should be activated more to provide comments on each other’s work rather than grades. She remarked pithily, “no to peer-marking; yes to peer-comments!”
If the goal of feedback is to ultimately nurture a self-directed and independent learner, then students need to be enculturated to feel comfortable with and experience growth through receiving and giving feedback from and to anyone—even those whose feedback messages they disagree with. It is human instinct to act more dutifully on agreeable feedback and/or that from trusted, legitimate sources of expertise and wisdom (—this might explain the findings about student performance above). However, if teachers aspire for their learners to still do better without their presence, and to do so by relying on one another, then learners have to be habituated to know what to do with all manner of peer-feedback. This is no different from learning to navigate real-world feedback to guard against confirmation bias, echo chambers and stagnation.
The Whats and Hows of Effective Feedback – Reminders and Revelations!
A friend who teaches university students once shared his persevering efforts in encouraging reluctant students to process and work on feedback, especially those who think little of their peers (we were exchanging thoughts on the development of intellectual humility). He instructs his students to respond to peer-feedback with reasons for why they will take or not take on their peer’s evaluation of their work and suggestions. He then looks at the revised draft in relation to the original draft with peer-comments and the student’s reasoned consideration of the peer’s feedback to decide on the student’s final grade. His conviction in designing his students’ feedback and assessment experiences this way, in spite of their protracted grouses about perceived ineffectiveness and tediousness, came to mind when Professor Lipnevich emphasised the following:
a. any feedback, if processed, will culminate in self-directed feedback;
b. instructional feedback—any information that students can use to improve their performance, learning or individual characteristics—is expected to have a stronger effect on performance and learning if it encourages students to engage in active processing; thus,
c. students could come into this habit by getting them to first process specific feedback (because it is easier to understand and work on) before they process bigger-picture holistic and/or epistemic feedback (feedback by questions).
My friend’s philosophy and practice of almost mandating that his students show evidence of actively considering others’ feedback and demonstrating independent judgements on it reminded me that truly effective feedback is not a simple endeavour. I recalled my own students balking when I invited them to respond in writing to my or their peers’ feedback to rationalise why they had chosen to or decided against incorporating the feedback in their improved draft—“Why can’t you just mark and tell us what’s wrong and right?”, “Why can’t you just mark, and we be done with the work?”, “My peer has given me shoddy feedback—this is a waste of my time!”, they complained. I wondered about the limits of always taking on students’ feedback on our feedback practices, especially when our feedback practices are intentionally not clean and easy—not the usual process of mark, return, review and reflect (and trust that somehow, the learning will transfer). Just like tough medicine that is hard to swallow, but which eventually makes our physical bodies better, really effective feedback practices which repair our bodies of learning might not be welcomed by many students as it is effortful and less QED (quite easily done): it requires students to actually think through questions, wrestle with the uncertainty of less simple answers, and do the hard business of thinking for each other and on their own.
However, if our larger goal is to develop self-directed learners capable of making independent and considered decisions, then our feedback practices need to vest more power with the learner and less with the teacher: less of us telling, more of them needing to show, in any way, how they had processed feedback and what they decided to do with it thereafter with the intention of improving their learning. Many of my long-suffering friends who teach much younger learners get this: they understand the importance of seeding in students, at an earlier age, an openness to and habit of working with feedback. They explicitly instruct their students to select three peer-comments to respond to (to manage their cognitive load) and invite them to write a short response in reply to each or for all three together, comprising statements of agreement, neutrality, or disagreement with their peer’s comments, with brief justifications. If primary school students can manage this and take feedback like champs, then why the groaning exhibited by older students in higher levels of education? There is an additional merit in enculturating our young learners into these habits of feedback-processing: it brings them into the awareness that feedback-giving and receiving is not a dichotomy—there is not only warm and cool, plus and minus, good or bad feedback—there can be perfectly neutral feedback too.
The teachers’ hope in designing their students’ feedback experiences this way is a noble and important one: their wish is that, over time, their students will, through working with feedback, truly acquire a growth rather than fixed mindset towards their learning and development and become increasingly comfortable with questions and determining for themselves how to respond, reflecting on why so, and exercising agency in deciding how to modify their approaches. In thinking about the two more complex questions many participants had brought into Workshop 1A—“How else might we provide even more effective feedback?” and “What really moves the needle in learning with feedback?”—I understood that the “more” in the first question could be seen a reference to quantity: of feedback work and monitoring on the part of the teachers in the examples aforementioned. Yet, “more” could also be seen as re-imagining how feedback may be done differently to yield “more effective” outcomes. Think of the other questions participants had: “We don’t have enough time to provide quality feedback to so many students!” and “The students aren’t and/or are lacking the ability to implement feedback!”. Why then do we administer more assignments and take on the burden of giving more feedback on all of these, when students might possibly learn more deeply and impactfully if we give them fewer assignments, but longer-term and process-oriented ones, so that students may learn more by doing more for each other and themselves?
Fundamentally, if our end-goal as teachers is to strengthen our students’ ability to learn without us, beyond school, and more from each other and/or on their own, then our own feedback practices must evolve. We might need to reconsider our “what works” beliefs and entertain the thought that more complex and less straightforward feedback design might be hard work at the beginning but eventually it might make the feedback work harder for us and our students in the long run. The existential realities of time and teacher-to-student ratio constraints might be inescapable, but we can escape the fear and lack of trust we have in our learners to eventually “get it” and “get there”. And when I think of my learners “getting it” and “getting there” I am not thinking of grades; I am thinking of small improvements—in their intellectual and more importantly, character growth. I am also under no delusion that all students will take to my feedback approaches as they too, have the prerogative and responsibility to own their decisions and learning. So, leaving Workshop 1A, I had no silver bullets or straightforward solutions to the basic and complex issues I and the participants had at the outset of the session. But I certainly left with more imagination about how feedback could and should be, and clarity about feedback practices that would not yield the longer-term and more humanistic dividends I hoped my students would invest in themselves.
[1] Please see, “ManyClasses 1: Assessing the Generalizable Effect of Immediate Feedback Versus Delayed Feedback Across Many College Classes”, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/25152459211027575 (accessed 27 September 2022)
[2] Ibid, page 1.
[3] Ibid, page 4.