The Role of Feedback in the Educational Process

In order to improve our own practice as a teacher, lesson planner and a professional in a teaching organisation working with others, it is important that we take account of feedback from various sources and evaluate our own performance on a regular basis. As Wilson, suggests:

In my point of view feedback is an essential tool for learners’ progress. If the student is not assessing their work then they are not learning and given feedback are vital to ensure best practice is maintained and the learners are achieving to their full potential.

All feedback needs to be concerned and supportive; it needs to include both negative and positive feedback. Positive can help us feel good about our self and positive about our skills that have been observed. However to develop further we need negative feedback to make improvements and grow as individuals, and

Feedback is a vital part of the assessment process as it gives the assessor an idea of if the learner has met the criteria set and if they haven’t, what action is needed to achieve the criteria.

College students submit a lot of writing to instructors who receive a lot of writing to be graded. In many instances, students are submitting multiple drafts of papers which need thoughtful and constructive feedback or commentary about student performance from instructors in order to improve and ultimately result in a better final draft. Certainly, instructors have a weighty task in front of them, to grade papers in a way that is received by students so they may strengthen their work. Look no further than Rate My Professor comment pages to know that students value quality feedback. Instructors are challenged to pursue what must be viewed and quality feedback but also feedback that is well received by students.

If the feedback is questionable then it becomes useless because it is not trusted. Positive and negative feedback will be more readily accepted if it is kept even, if it is more of one then it may not be received well by the learner for reasons that become obvious within the learner’s behavior or work.

By providing feedback the pupils will see more clearly what they need to do next and how to improve on their work if needed, examples of feedback could be questions in a group or a through a whole class discussion.

Instructor Feedback was an important factor in developing my writing skill through this past 10 weeks. It notified what mistakes did I make, and how to fix them. Given this point, I was able to enhance my essays, and my project with the comments, and suggestions given by the instructor.

“Praise” is an action that parents, teachers, and adults overly use when they desire an action from students and children. Most of the time, adults say phrases such as “Good Job” or “Fantastic” to boost the moral of students or children. But praise doesn’t always lead to positive growth of an individual in the long run. There is, however, a stronger alternative to praise that many 21st century Western societies haven’t quite accepted. This is known as criticism. We see criticism everywhere in our daily lives; from the workplace, to sporting events and competitions, and even in schools across America. It’s a lot stronger than praise because it provides students with a basis of comparison, and truth and honesty. Therefore, criticism has a better long-term effect on feedback and growth and should be balanced with praise because it allows students to learn from previous mistakes or issues, forcing them to make a positive change about themselves that could potentially help in the future.

I welcome feedback from my field instructor in all areas. She is my mentor and I can tell she is truly interested in helping me grow as a professional. I very much enjoy the fact that she starts all of her feedback by giving positive, strengths before providing areas for growth. This allows me to see that I have things I am very good at and that I am effectively learning. It also shows me that I am a student and have areas where I can strengthen my skills. I am not sure I am overly sensitive to suggestions from my field instructor.

The Role of Feedback in the Learning of Skills I have been given an assignment to discuss the role of feedback in the learning of skills. Feedback is associated with guidance in order to learn and develop skills. Guidance is information related to the task ahead, feedback is information about what we have done. As with guidance, the most appropriate form of feedback depends on the learner and the activity being learnt.

It is possible for accurate feedback to be a powerful resource in efforts to improve teaching and learning. Nevertheless, feedback that classifies the observed practices incorrectly is likely to involve a considerable opportunity cost for teachers as well as students (Iqbal, 2013). Notably, in 2009, a report by the name The Widget Effect was released by The New Teacher Project (TNTP). The report exposed the prevailing teacher evaluations as both infrequent and largely subjective (Jerald, 2012). Similarly, the attention towards the effectiveness of teacher evaluation is fairly new after decades of using teacher evaluation tools that have been noted to provide little or no useful information regarding the technical core of teaching (Harris, Ingle and Rutledge, 2014). Consequently, the tools often yielded inflated performance ratings that would not be taken with the seriousness necessary to inform basic personnel decisions (Jerald, 2012). It was observed that, despite relying mostly on direct observations made on teachers’ practices, they provided little, if any, useful feedback that can inform teachers’ improvement (Jerald, 2012). Thus, in adopting new evaluation system, there is a common problem in school systems as to the way to ensure that the observers’ coaching and feedback are free from significant classification errors and are largely based on judiciously accurate judgment regarding a lesson.

Analysis on internal feedback is conducted frequently at Cardiff University. Though there is little research done on the actual impact of conducting regular questionnaires on the quality of teaching, Kember et al. (2010) found that there was ‘no evidence of an improvement in the quality of teaching’ during a 4-year observation period across 25 departments in one university. (The quality was measured using a student feedback questionnaire, with a 5 point Likert scale. Contrary to this, Tuckman et al. (1968) found evidence suggesting an improvement in the quality of teaching as a result of internal feedback over a 12-week observation period. This was concluded by monitoring the student ratings of 286 teachers.

I appreciated every time my teacher gave me feedback. Any kind of feedback (recast, clarification request, metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, explicit correction, repetition, etc) was okay to me. While I was teaching beginner Spanish, I preferred to use metalinguistic feedback, elicitation, and explicit correction.

Corrective feedback is defined as a ‘reply to learner expressions having an error’ and its major role is to offer guidance and insight to teachers on what they need to provide to their learners in order to promote growth and comprehension of the second language. This paper seeks to identify the various types of oral corrective feedback through studying of previous literatures published on corrective feedback which are broadly classified into two categories: prompts and reformulations. Despite the existence of shortcomings associated with corrective feedback, the receptiveness of students to corrective feedback indicates its significance in enhancing the learning of second languages.