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Paper presented at the ECER Conference in Hamburg 17-20 September 2003.
Network 22 ”Reserach in Higher Education”
Promoting the use of feedback as a means of student and staff learning
Dr Lauritz Brännström[1]
Department of Behavioral Sciences, Linköping University
Abstract. Feedback is a necessary prerequisite for the student or the group of students when they evaluate their progression in learning. The feedback can be provided by the student, by fellow students or by the teacher or supervisor. However, the forms and the content of feedback to the student often vary unpredictably in their distinctiveness and usefulness as a support to the learning process of the student. Thus, it can be hard to know what factors made learning more efficient in one situation as compared to another one. Since learning is associated with the student and/or fellow students, the follow up of their learning is often terminated as soon as the student has finished examination and delivered course evaluations. Parallel to the learning of the student there should be a learning associated with the teacher and the teacher´s staff. The way the goals of a course are approached by educational means do contain much information for the teachers as to which means should be the most efficient ones. In order to safeguard information about the teaching events as presumptive causes of efficient student learning and staff development, more effort should be put on the documentation of teaching and other decided activities that were supposed to promote learning. The paper gives concrete examples of the use of different means to make the feedback to students more efficient. By beeing more explicit about the goals of the course at focus for the student´s learning much uncertainty can be reduced on what is expected of the student as regards the area of content to be learned and mastered. It also means that the self generated feedback of the student will become more easily to assess as compared to feedback around more general and amorphous stated learning goals. By beeing explicit about the goals of the course the teacher also sets the standard for evaluating the student´s achievements of the curriculum at focus. From a cognitive point of view the effect of making the constructs and the relations between them more explicit should facilitate the structuring and remembrance of the learning material. Also, staff learning and development should be positively correlated with the expliciteness of the goals stated and the formulated central constructs associated with them. However, much of the teaching activities designed and their impact on student learning are vulnerable to ”positive entropy” since many of them will not be properly evaluated and incorporated in the teachers´ conception of functionally and efficient means of teaching. Setting goals is also a question of balance: beeing to explicit and precise as regards course goals might result in a closing up strategy of learning while beeing to general and imprecise in goal formulation might give no hints of what is actually expected of the student to achieve. This paper discusses the use of different means to make feedback to students and the staff more efficient and a question of common interest if the ambition is to enrich the curriculum and support student learning as well as staff development. Data from an ongoing project on student and teacher feedback will also be presented.
The role of feedback in an academic context
In order for the student to evaluate progress in learning, whether it be a subject or a skill, he will need information that informs him of his progress toward the goal he is trying to achieve. The feedback information will normally come from his physical or interpersonal environment. In order to be efficient, the feedback, normally exposed as part of an interpersonal process, must be both accurate and focused. Otherwise the students efforts to learn might be reduced to trial and error. The feedback to the student can be self-generated, where the student himself compares information reflecting his aquired knowledge to information in terms of a stated goal for learning or some form thereof. The feedback can come from a single fellow student or a group of fellow students. In those cases the giving of feedback will be part of an interpersonal process where the relation between the student who receives feedback and the one/those presenting it will be crucial. The same holds, in principle, for the situation where the teacher is the one presenting feedback to the student. The interpersonal relation may in that case also be affected by the inequalities in power between the teacher and the student. Added to that kind of inequalities in power are the cultural rules for saving face which are present in any interpersonal situation.
The receiver of feedback must ask himself whether the giver of feedback will present him thruthful information which is guided by sincere motives (to help) and which are relevant for him with respect to what he is actually trying to learn. In turn, the giver of feedback must ask himself whether the receiver of feedback will actually listen to him, whether he will actually take seriously what he has to tell, and, whether the receiver will see the giver of feedback as beeing helpful rather than punishing.
Even if it seems to be relatively easy to stipulate some of the desired characteristics of feedback as a means of supporting the student´s learning, we still might find that the form and the content of feedback in an academic context is not always standing in any unquestionable relation to how distinctive and useful it is experienced by the student although the aim should be to facilitate the learning process of the student. A meta-analyses on the effects of feedback interventions on performance (Kluger & De Nisi, 1996) suggest that feedback intervention studies might reveal very different outcome patterns – in a considerable number of the reviewed studies, feedback did even have detrimental effects on performance (one third of the feedback interventions). The results of the analysis also showed that ”feedback intervention effectiveness decreases as attention moves up the hierachy closer to the self and away from the task. These findings are further moderated by task characteristics that are still poorly understood.” (op cit., p. 254).
The forms and the content of feedback to the student normally do vary considerably over courses, examinations, teachers and so on. Since feedback, in order to be efficient, probably ought to be individually designed to the student in question the precondition for efficient feedback will not always be met. Often the time and effort needed by the teacher will probably exceed the resources at hand. For instance, providing individually designed feedback in a class of students will put great demands on the teacher in many aspects as regards the need for time, the mental effort to be exerted, the content to be well aquainted with, the comparisons to be made between standards of performance and actual performance, and so on. One reaction from the students could, then, concern the scarcity of feedback. However, asking students about the form of feedback they mostly reveal a positive attitude to the idea of a multiplicity of forms. Then, the important point, from the students point of view, is that they actually are getting feedback while the forms of that feedback seems to be a less controversial question (cf London & Smither, 1995).
Another way of arranging feedback is to rely on the information provided by the students of the group that the student is part of. Consulting literature on learning in groups gives rather exhaustive descriptions of how to give and receive feedback as part of a two-way communication process. As an example, one finds in one of them the following rules (Jaques, 2000): The rules for giving feedback are emphasizing that feedback should be invited, be descripitive, be revealing the giver´s positions or feelings vis-á-vis the receiver, be specific, be sensitive to the needs of the receiver as well as the giver, be directed towards behavior the receiver can change or control, be timed, be checked to be understood by the giver, be checked with regard to accuracy by consulting group members to the student. The receiver of feedback should listen to the person giving feedback, acccept feedback as a gift from that person, check the feedback with another source of information, give the feedback serious consideration, communicate the decisions made to the giver and tell the giver what he might do to help the receiver change his behavior.
As can be seen from the above listing the feedback concept is referring to concrete behaviors of both the giver and receiver of feedback. It does not focus primarily on questions of uncertainty and dissonance that should be of importance in learning new material. By concentrating the feedback to questions of uncertainty and experienced dissonance as regards facts and principles in relation to already established knowledge etcetera, the value of the feedback probably should be positive to the learning process. Therefore, in order to incorporate the feedback on subject related issues it should refer to the knowledge structure of the individual receiving feedback (see the feedback concept summarized from a cognitive view in Kreitner, Kinicki & Buelens, 1999). By referring to a system of principles for deliberate feedback there should be benificial effects of it in terms of stimulating and facilitating the learning by the receiver of that feedback.
One such system of principles for deliberate feedback to stimulate and facilitate learning can be found in Schein (1999, p 140): ”Goals must be clear and agreed to, the emphasis should be on description and appreciation, the feedback should be as concrete and specific as possible, both giver and receiver must have constructive motives, criticism should not be avoided if it is specific and focused on behavior, the giver should own his own feelings and reactions rather than resorting to impersonal generalities, and both giver and receiver should be psychologically ready for a feedback discussion.”
Even if the forms of feedback do follow the general outlines presented above there is still a great uncertainty as regards the content of the feedback to the student; how distinctive is the feedback in relation to the content to be learned? And how useful is the feedback information as a support to learning? Is the content of the feedback information of the right kind with respect to the goals of learning? Does the feedback information serve to reduce the uncertainty of the student in his learning effort? In many cases the student will be left to himself to judge whether he has attended the goals of the curriculum. The judgments will mostly be based on rather sparse individually directed comments coming from the teacher. The scarcity of comments are mostly due to the fact that individually oriented feedback will be to costly to realize, thus, more standardized forms of feedback will be used, like feedback to groups of students instead of individual students. One illustration of the complexity of processing feedback is summarized in a model by Ilgen, Fisher & Taylor (1979).
In the following three realistic examples of the complexity of questions raised about providing and using feedback information in higher education will be presented. According to the advices given on how feedback information ought to be presented to individuals and members of groups the following examples will extend the analysis to an academic context and beyound the rather straightforward situations normally described as a kind of prototypical examples. Two of the examples will illustrate the complexity of providing feedback to the student and his fellow students in an academic context (very little effort has been directed to that question according to Anderson, 1995) but also its consequences for the teacher or to the staff of teachers (the third example) as regards their tasks and their learning,
First example - ”Organizing work activities” is one course representing a part of the organizational perspective on the Programme for psychologists at our university. The students are working in study groups using problem based learning. The goals of learning as well as the central constructs to be learned are formulated and assembled in a written document. The goals of the course are on a relatively abstract level (like ”aquiring knowledge about different models of organizing work activities and their applicability in practice”). Also the central constructs are at a general level (like ”types of organizations”, ”decision levels”, ”coordination” and so on). During the study period of the course the choice of the study groups will be their interpretations of the goals formulated, thus, student learning is to a high degree dependent on what the students as a group decide to focus on. The individual student then can make comparisons whether he is in the vincinity of the goals stipulated by the group but also make comparisons to the goals of the written document. The perceived discrepancies between the student´s knowledge of the subject and the goals stipulated will help the student make further efforts in directing his learning activities towards what is expected.
A still further adjustment of the goals of learning will be made by the teacher in order to be somewhat more specific about what achievements the students is expected to manifest in the examination of the course. The adjustment is a result of a feedback information from the students who, as the examination approaches, want more information about the criteria used to evaluate whether the officially formulated goal(s) are reached or not. By informing the students more specificially what they are expected to know and what performance to manifest, the student can make further adjustments of his learning efforts. More precisely a goal stipulated as (during the course the student should be) ”aquiring knowledge about different models of organizing work activities and their applicability in practice” was given a more precise operationalised form in (the student should) ”have such knowledge about different models of organizing work activities that he can apply the constructs of the chosen models on those (new) examples that form the examination task (at least two different models are requried)”. Given those prerequisites the student may mobilize further efforts in order to adjust his knowledge to a closer match to the stipulated learning demands. As regards the central constructs of the course similar clarifications were given. Each construct should be defined and its relation to other central constructs of the course should be formulated.
The examination was organized around four short descriptions of real examples of ”organizing work activities” (different wards at a university hospital). The task for each study group was to analyze the examples in accordance with the stipulated goals and the central constructs of the course as formulated in the written document over the course and the more precisely formulated criteria presented at the examination. For example a more precise goal could be formulated as ”in the study group students must be able to show that they have the knowledge of different organization models to such a degree that they are able to apply the constructs of the models to the examples of ´organizing work activities´ that are presented in the examination task”. They were also told what was expected as regards knowledge of the central constructs of the course: to know the meaning of each single construct (as a definition or as part of a context understandable to others), to show how a single construct can be related to other main constructs of the course, and finally, to value the importance of the construct in order to describe the activities that are present in the examples of the examination task.
After the course the students were asked to rate how well the stipulated and more precisely formulated goals had been reached. Mostly the ratings of the students were very positive with small dispersion for all the goals to be achieved (a mean of around 5 on a 7th grade scale with a dispersion of approximately one scale unit; n=24).
The students reactions to the kind of examination used was quite positive with mean rating around 5 on a 7th grade scale and a dispersion somewhat exceeding a scale unit (n=24). The students verbal comments to the examination were also very positive and underlined the fact that examination is another opportunity to learn more about the subject at focus. Typical comments from the students were ”enjoyable form of examination. An opportunity to apply the knowledge one has acquired and at the same time learn new things” (respondent A), ”a very good opportunity for a new learning experience built on the intellligent use of the knowledge of the group members. The examination task was very relevant for the course.” (respondent B), ”an opportunity for further learning by using the knowledge of the group put into a relevant context” (respondent C).
Thus, in order to support the student learning there is a number of feedback situations needed and where the precision of the feedback information becomes gradually more articulated. By observing the discrepancy between the goals of learning and the student´s own knowledge of the subject area, the student may subsequently direct his learning efforts more intelligently. From a teacher perspective there must be a parallel and ongoing processing of information from the students when they are trying to adjust their learning effort to match the goals of learning. The information from the student may come from a number of sources like questioning at lectures, discussions at seminars, from students in work group and so on.