What's Feedback System in Education? Discover It's Importance, Mechanisms, Types, Advantages, Disadvantages and Strategies for Improving Quality of Education + Much More ..!
In the points below, we'll look at why feedback is so important in the education sector:
Improved Academic Outcomes: Effective and relevant feedback allows learners to reflect on their learning strategies and outcomes, allowing them to make adjustments to make better progress at each stage. But this is only possible when you have a valid feedback strategy designed to determine learners’ levels of understanding, which varies depending on the individual, as well as the rate of skill development. Based on the feedback given by each student, you can divide them into groups and set achievable targets or goals to maximize academic outcomes.
Improved Relations and Collaboration: Students understand that their professors are willing to help them and are genuinely concerned about their education when they receive appropriate feedback. This improves relationships among students and teachers and also creates more opportunities for collaboration. Moreover, knowing exactly where the efforts are required or detailed study material) the process becomes optimized, both in terms of time and efficiency, which further increases the importance of student feedback.
- Improved Process and Faculty Performance: Because we are teaching and learning through a blank screen, feedback in education is critical, especially in the age of online learning. In many cases, students in an online course do not respond well to what the teacher is teaching. Here, they should provide constructive feedback to their subject teachers so that they can improv
- e their teaching techniques and students can improve their understanding of it.
Feedback can serve a number of purposes and take a number of forms. Feedback can be provided as a single entity – ie: informal feedback on a student’s grasp of a concept in class – or a combination of multiple entities – ie: formal, formative, peer feedback on stage one of an assessment task. Each has its place in enhancing and maximising student learning, thus where possible, courses should provide opportunities for a range of feedback types.
Informal feedback
Informal feedback can occur at any times as it is something that emerges spontaneously in the moment or during action. Therefore informal feedback requires the building of rapport with students to effectively encourage, coach or guide them in daily management and decision-making for learning. This might occur in the classroom, over the phone, in an online forum or virtual classroom.
Formal feedback
Formal feedback is planned and systematically scheduled into the process. Usually associated with assessment tasks, formal feedback includes the likes of marking criteria, competencies or achievement of standards, and is recorded for both the student and organisation as evidence.
Formative feedback
The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. Therefore formative feedback is best given early in the course, and prior to summative assessments. Formative feedback helps students to improve and prevent them from making the same mistakes again. In some cases, feedback is required before students can progress, or feel capable of progressing, to the next stage of the assessment.
Summative feedback
The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark. Therefore summative feedback consists of detailed comments that are related to specific aspects of their work, clearly explains how the mark was derived from the criteria provided and additional constructive comments on how the work could be improved.
Student peer feedback
There is no longer need for teachers to be the only experts within a course. With basic instruction and ongoing support, students can learn to give quality feedback, which is highly valued by peers. Providing students with regular opportunities to give and receive peer feedback enriches their learning experiences and develops their professional skill set.
Student self feedback
This is the ultimate goal of feedback for learning. During the provision of feedback, teachers have the opportunity not only to provide direction for the students, but to teach them, through explicit modelling and instruction, the skills of self-assessment and goal setting, leading them to become more independent (Sackstein, 2017). To help students reach autonomy teachers can explicitly identify, share, and clarify learning goals and success criteria; model the application of criteria using samples; provide guided opportunities for self-feedback; teach students how to use feedback to determine next steps and set goals; and allow time for self-feedback/reflection.
Constructive feedback
This type of feedback is specific, issue-focused and based on observations. There are four types of constructive feedback:
- Negative feedback – corrective comments about past behaviour. Focuses on behaviour that wasn’t successful and shouldn’t be repeated.
- Positive feedback – affirming comments about past behaviour. Focuses on behaviour that was successful and should be continued.
- Negative feed-forward – corrective comments about future performance. Focuses on behaviour that should be avoided in the future.
- Positive feed-forward – affirming comments about future behaviour. Focused on behaviour that will improve performance in the future.
Next, let’s look at levels of feedback. The levels correspond to the different stages of learning, from beginning stages through to competency or mastery.
First level of feedback: the task and product level
- This type of feedback is information-focused and should lead to acquiring more and/or different information, as well as building surface knowledge.
- Examples of feedback at this level include:
- whether the student’s response was right or wrong
- whether a response needs elaboration or revision
- whether more information is needed
- guidance on building more task knowledge
Second level of feedback: the process for completing a task
- This kind of feedback helps learners detect what they might be doing wrong and what alternative strategies or approaches might correct an error or lead to a better outcome.
- This feedback should lead to deeper understanding.
Third level of feedback: monitoring student learning
- This feedback helps students resolve the conflict between where they are in their learning tasks and the desired outcomes and intended successes.
- Examples can include asking students what else they think they could do to improve an outcome, asking them to explain why they think they got an answer wrong, or asking them to seek alternative methods for achieving a specific goal.
Fourth level of feedback: the “self” level
- This level of feedback addresses praise. Praise should not be used to dilute the power of feedback on a given learning process or task.
- While praise is important, it should be kept separate from feedback that improves the learning process.
- Praise may comfort and support a student, but it does not provide task-related information, nor does it result in more commitment to the learning objective.
- While praise does have value in certain contexts, Hattie cites studies that show praise has a low effect size, hovering around .
Providing constructive feedback to individual students, encouraging them to engage in and reflect upon the learning process, leads to positive learning outcomes and achieves results. How the feedback is given matters more than how much feedback is given.
Focused, specific feedback helps students understand learning objectives, choose the best strategies for the task, make course corrections throughout the learning process, monitor their own learning, and determine where to go next.
Feedback is a powerful tool that helps individuals, teams, and organizations to identify their strengths and areas for improvement. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages of feedback:
Advantages:
Improvement: Feedback can help individuals improve their performance by providing specific information on what they did well and what they need to work on. It helps individuals identify their strengths and weaknesses and take steps to improve their performance.
Goal setting: Feedback can help individuals set realistic goals by providing information on their current performance level and what they need to do to achieve their goals.
Motivation: Feedback can be a powerful motivator. Positive feedback can encourage individuals to continue their efforts, while constructive feedback can provide the necessary guidance to improve performance.
Communication: Feedback can improve communication by creating an open and honest dialogue between individuals, teams, and organizations. It can also help to prevent misunderstandings and conflicts.
Bias: Feedback can be influenced by personal bias, which can lead to inaccurate assessments and unfair evaluations.
Delivery: Feedback that is delivered poorly can be ineffective or even damaging. Poorly delivered feedback can cause defensiveness and resistance, rather than encouraging improvement.
Interpretation: Feedback can be misinterpreted, causing confusion and miscommunication. Individuals may interpret feedback differently depending on their perspective, leading to misunderstandings.
Timing: Feedback that is given too late may be less effective, as individuals may have already moved on from the situation. Feedback that is given too early may be premature and not reflective of the entire situation.
- Collect feedback.
- Analyze it.
- Acknowledge the feedback.
- Act on the insights.
- Follow up with your users.
As educators, our work is often personal, but we don’t have to take the feedback personally. School leaders, you will likely have the first look at student feedback and therefore a head start on processing the data. Anticipating your team’s reactions and thoughtfully planning the data-dive conversation will better position you to coach staff and begin action planning.
Anticipate the 4 D’s (some or all of which you may be feeling as well):
- Staff might feel defensive, and look outward for explanation. They may shy away from taking it seriously. Reinforce that students are the experts on their own experience, and coach staff to ask why students answered that way.
- Some members of your team might feel dismissive - they could question the methodology of the survey or the validity of the data. Make sure this information is included in the survey report or that you have it on hand to share with staff.
- Other colleagues might feel dejected, or may be tempted to downplay the negative aspects of the student feedback.
Given your student survey results, how do you think your team will respond? Take note of the reactions you think you’ll encounter and plan how you’ll support your team.
Then, in the group conversation:
- Reaffirm your shared goal or mutual purpose. Since student perceptions are to drive academic outcomes. Your mission or vision statement can be useful here too.
- Restate the “why.” Consider inviting department chairs to share about why student feedback is important for their work. This models taking a broad view instead of taking the data personally.
- Maintain safety. Conditions for dialogue require that individuals do not feel threatened. Create space for discussion and debate.
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