We all receive feedback, all of the time. Why, then, are we not better at using feedback to get better? And why does it sometimes seem to make us worse?

In a 1996 meta-analysis, looking at the effects of 607 feedback interventions on student progress, researchers found that 38 per cent of them had a negative impact on performance.

More up-to-date studies confirm that, although feedback remains one of the most powerful tools for learning that we have, the effects of it can still sometimes be negative (17 per cent of the time in one meta-analysis) and often highly variable and inconsistent.

One reason why this is the case is that often we don’t really like receiving feedback. Some feedback can feel downright threatening to our self-worth, triggering defensiveness rather than a desire to change. And what is true for us will also be true for our students.

But we do not, as a rule, tend to focus our discussions about feedback on the perspective of the person receiving it. I have been offered countless feedback strategies for students but I have almost never been invited to consider how they would be experienced.

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The absolute centrality of the learner to the feedback process was brought home to me when I first read the definition of feedback given by David Boud and David Carless, who describe it as “a process through which learners make sense of information from various sources and use it to enhance their work or learning strategies”.

Under this definition of feedback, then, if nothing is done by the learner, it doesn’t even count as feedback at all.

Indeed, with this definition, the form of our feedback - self/peer/teacher, verbal/written/coded/printed on to stickers, green pen/red pen, immediate/delayed, marks/grades/comments/two stars and a wish, and so on - takes a back seat to the fundamental question of how students can use this information to improve their learning.

This also goes beyond simply improving the assignment in front of them. If we are to improve students’ work in general, even correcting a specific mistake may not count as feedback, if it does not subsequently lead to a more transferrable benefit.

We need to, as Dylan Wiliam has pithily put it, “improve the student and not the work”.

For students to be the centre of the feedback process, they need to understand the importance of feedback, what counts as feedback, how to interpret it, what to do with it and how to cope with it emotionally. They need to be feedback literate.

So what does that look like?

1. Appreciating feedback processes

Recognising feedback

Claudia is a geography teacher who is about to start teaching a new topic on rainforests. She puts a starter activity on the board to recap prior learning and asks students to answer the questions individually in their books.

Claudia then circulates around the room and reads what is being written, underlining where she thinks improvements can be made, and also annotating some answers with brief comments. She verbally corrects a misconception in one student’s work. She also notes that one question was being quite poorly answered in general.

After three minutes, Claudia tells students to discuss their answers with their partners, and that if their partner mentions anything that they have not written, they should record it in a different colour pen.

Finally, she uses cold calling and bounces each question to other students to see if more can be added. She then takes a few minutes to more carefully review the question that was presenting difficulty.

If we asked the students in this class what feedback they had received during this time, what would they say?

Some of them may mention having received some written comments, which is often what students immediately think of as feedback (and research shows that students can be quite resistant to receiving feedback that deviates from this).

In practice, however, this constitutes only a tiny fraction of the possible information that students could have used to enhance their work or learning strategies.

Claudia has given live written and verbal feedback, there was peer feedback during the discussion and again during the whole-class review, then a specific reteaching segment.

All of this information could be profitably used by the students, but few will be alert to the breadth of potential feedback sources in a classroom.

How many students, for example, naturally treat hearing another student answer a question as an opportunity to compare and assess their own knowledge against the answer given? How many students do we see automatically reaching for their pens to note down a great answer given by one of their peers? Very few, unless we have told them to.

The enormous variety of potential feedback sources that exist in our classrooms will only be useful to students if we have explicitly alerted them to their presence, and demonstrated how they can use each source of information to their own advantage.

Feedback-friendly sequencing

If we want students to appreciate feedback, we should structure our courses and assessments so that the feedback we provide has a chance of being useful. This might mean including questions from the topics of previous assessments on later tests, or structuring knowledge and skills in a hierarchy.

I remember speaking to a Year 9 student a few years ago about their progress in a science subject:

“How do you know that you are learning successfully?”

“We have tests every two weeks, so I know how I am doing.”

“And what happens with the things you get wrong on the tests? How do you learn those?”

“The teacher writes the correct answers on the paper.”

“And what do you do with that?”

[blank face]

“Do you go back over that feedback at home to try to learn it properly?”

“No.”

“Do you go back over any of that information in class?”

“No. In class, we just move on to something new after the test”

The student had clearly not made the connection between feedback, learning and future success. As a result, they were not really valuing the information that the teacher had written (presumably time-consumingly) on the test papers. The routines and sequencing of the lessons were not helping them to make these connections as successfully as they could.

2. Managing affect

Depersonalising feedback

The way we deliver feedback can reduce the threat that students feel from it. This can start with the language that we use, describing incorrect answers as a process rather than a personal event.

Wherever possible, I now use the phrase “retrieval failure” rather than “forgetting”, and “learning opportunities” rather than “mistakes”. It’s cheesy, but it can be a powerful reframing, especially for students who otherwise struggle with the emotional aspect of feedback.

We can also design systems for delivering feedback that make it harder for students to attach it to their self-worth: avoiding using grades or delaying grading until after feedback has been acted upon, for example.

Another approach is to reduce the potential for competition and comparison between students in the class. Competition is actively harmful to feedback because students prioritise entirely different things; competition values performance, whereas feedback values learning. Routines can be helpful here, such as reviewing tests and assessments in silence (at least initially) to avoid students comparing results.

Modelling feedback receipt

As teachers, we can model being able to receive feedback ourselves. A couple of years ago, my department and I got very excited about a new online tool for student self-testing and retrieval practice.

Perhaps a little too excited, it turned out. In a student survey a few months later, it emerged that we were underestimating the time it took students to answer and properly review the questions, and therefore setting too many questions in one go for them to be able to reflect and properly learn from the feedback.

As well as rectifying the problem to everyone’s satisfaction, we were able to model a positive, open response to feedback.

Learning literacy

The students who are most intimidated and anxious at the prospect of receiving feedback are often those with an unrealistic idea of how learning actually happens, especially how smooth and error-free it is supposed to be.

Students’ emotions around feedback are likely to be far more manageable, therefore, if they understand that learning is not a simple linear process, and that occasional retrieval failure is essential.

Drawing on research findings, I emphasise to my classes that students who forget an answer the first time around, but who take the feedback on board effectively, are likely to learn just as effectively as those who got the answer right in the first place. I also highlight the finding that students who have a go at an answer, even if it involves guessing, will learn more from subsequent feedback than those who simply leave answers blank.

All this can contribute to what researchers term a positive error climate: an environment in which errors are accepted, and even welcomed, as an essential part of the learning process. Creating such a climate has recently been found to predict a better relationship between students and teachers.

3. Making judgements

It is important that students are also able to understand and make feedback judgements themselves, through processes such as self- and peer-assessment. The research suggests that investing classroom time into training students to self- and peer-assess can improve their academic outcomes, especially if they are given enough time to practise.

Scaffolding assessment judgements

It can be useful to build student assessment tasks up from a low initial base, introducing more complex assessment judgements slowly over time. This might, for example, involve a progression like the following:

• Identifying specific common misconceptions (provided by the teacher).
• Checking that work contains all the features listed in a submission checklist.
• Reading answers slowly and closely to check for clarity of expression and explanation.
• Interpreting feedback codes.
• Self-marking answers to flashcard-style questions.
• Identifying whether targets from previous work have been met.
• Marking answers using an exam mark scheme.

Scaffolding in this way not only builds students’ skills, it also builds their belief in their skills (and in those of their peers). This increases the value that they will place on the feedback that they are receiving, and the likelihood that they will actually act on it.

4. Taking action

Feedback record-keeping

One rather mundane reason why students sometimes struggle to enact their feedback targets is that there is often a gap between assessments, during which time they will have forgotten what it was that they were supposed to be working on, lost the sheet entirely or, in the case of some of my students, filed it carefully away into an ever-expanding sheaf of about 500 loose papers in their backpack.

It can therefore be very helpful to enact classroom routines that help students to keep records of feedback (be that online, in exercise books or just on a sheet of paper).

Routines can also then be built to encourage students to refer to their targets before each new piece of work (by writing them on to the top of their next assessment, for example).

Giving it time

If we want our students to value the feedback they receive, and to do something with it, then we need to treat it like it is a valuable thing ourselves. Actions speak louder than words, so if we tell students that feedback is crucial but squeeze it into the final five minutes of a lesson, we undermine our own message.

Classroom time is a zero-sum game, so any time doing one activity means less of another, and in content-heavy courses, this can naturally lead us to prioritise delivery. But if we really value feedback as a learning tool, we need to devote time to it, even if this comes at the cost of other useful or important classroom activities.

This might involve building time for receipt and response into our regular classroom or work routines (such as having a weekly homework task to follow up on feedback, or dedicated lesson time given to respond to essay feedback and to immediately have a go at rewriting a section).

Feedback that can feed forward

Feedback literacy does not come naturally. We’re fighting against a natural tendency not to want exactly the sorts of experiences that school forces students to have daily. Who wouldn’t secretly prefer to just be told that they’re good at something, rather than critiqued? Who wouldn’t just prefer to be given simple feedback that identifies mistakes and provides replacement answers, rather than being forced to work out things for themselves, decipher codes or mark their friend’s work?

Interestingly, even when students are able to accurately report that the purpose of feedback is to improve the wider process, when reflecting on what their ideal feedback would contain, they still often prefer task‐focused feedback. The feedback our students want may not always be the feedback they know they need.

This is why, in addition to the four components of feedback literacy given above, it is so important to share the rationale for what we do with feedback in schools; explaining why we are doing things, and the potential benefits that the system should bring.

This is especially important if what we are doing departs from what students have been used to previously, or if it conflicts with their intuition about effective learning. If students understand why they are doing something then they are more likely to buy into the process, and this gives the best chance of the feedback systems we create being effective.

Michael Hobbiss is a psychology teacher and cognitive neuroscience researcher

If you’d like to assess the levels of feedback literacy at your school then an open-access feedback literacy behaviour scale is available here.

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