Feedback For Learning

Susan Askew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134558070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teachers may be surrounded by feedback and involved in it every day, but the notion is poorly analysed and poorly used. Feedback for Learning provides an important collection of contributions to the highly topical theme of feedback to support learning.
The book spans three major areas which affect all teachers:
*young people's learning
*teachers' learning
*organisational learning.
The authors critically examine the assumption that feedback necessarily has positive learning outcomes and describe models and practices which are more likely to result in effective learning at the individual, group and organisational level.

1 Gifts, ping-pong and loops – linking feedback and learning

Susan Askew and Caroline Lodge

It may seem that feedback is a rather small notion to write a whole book about. However, we suggest that it is time that understandings about feedback in education are examined more closely. In this chapter we adopt a broad definition of feedback which includes all dialogue to support learning in both formal and informal situations. We argue that this dialogue will be influenced by different views of learning and we need to explore feedback alongside associated beliefs about learning, to consider how feedback can be most effective in promoting learning.

Learning is increasingly being recognised as complex. Many writers now recognise the importance of the emotional and social dimension of learning as well as the cognitive (Askew and Carnell 1998; Epstein 1993; Goleman 1996; International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century 1996; Whitaker 1995). The relationship between learning and teaching is being viewed as a dynamic process, rather than a one-way transmission of knowledge (Askew and Carnell 1998; Biggs and Moore 1993; Watkins et al. 1996). Learning is supported by a whole range of processes, one of which is feedback. Gipps (1995; Gipps and Stobart 1997) argues that feedback is a crucial feature of teaching and learning processes and one element in a repertoire of connected strategies to support learning. The chapters in this book reinforce the importance of feedback in enhancing the learning of individuals, groups and organisations.

In this chapter we explore and expand the discourses of feedback. We suggest that far from being a simple and uncomplicated notion, dilemmas and tensions arise when we talk and write about feedback. Feedback is a complex notion, often embedded in a common-sense and simplistic dominant discourse. In writing about feedback we find ourselves struggling with the conceptions and language in common use. Feedback is a term used in electronics, mechanics and ecology and these uses have an impact on its use in education. The feedback loop is familiar in electronic systems as high pitched whistling when sound output is returned to the microphone by a loudspeaker. In our central heating systems a thermostat relays information which results in the heating being turned on or off. Lovelock’s mathematical model ‘Daisyworld’ demonstrated how temperature is regulated as a consequence of feedback loops between the ecosystem’s organisms and their environment (Capra 1996). It is common to talk about ‘giving’ and ‘receiving’ feedback, but feedback is not always a ‘gift’ from one person to another. When there is a dominant discourse it is a struggle to find language which reflects alternative views.

This chapter briefly introduces the reader to the origins of the book and to its contents. It then sets out a framework for exploring different conceptions of feedback for learning. Each of these approaches is examined to consider how ideas about feedback are related to beliefs about learning, to explore the processes necessary for feedback to help learning and to identify some problems. We move on to consider how research paradigms influence beliefs about learning from research. The chapter concludes by suggesting that effective learning must include a wider conception of feedback than that of the dominant discourse and take on the characteristics of constructive and co-constructive dialogue described in this chapter and by many of the writers in this book.

ORIGINS AND SCOPE OF THIS BOOK

In Feedback for Learning we present multiple discourses on feedback. The book grew out of research seminars held at the Institute of Education, University of London, which gave the opportunity for members of the Assessment, Guidance and Effective Learning Academic group to present their research findings on feedback in a range of educational contexts. What emerged from the seminars was the importance of feedback in supporting learning at individual, group and organisational levels. We observed that a focus on feedback at all these levels is popular at the moment and that the notion of feedback seems generally to be taken as unproblematic. It also emerged that people had different perceptions of feedback, its functions and processes based on their perceptions of learning. These discourses are framed by the research interests of the contributors and do not cover the whole field.

Every chapter in the book is concerned with challenging the implicit assumptions on which approaches to feedback are based, and touch on a bigger question – what is ‘effective’ learning? The book explores feedback at different levels: Part 1 examines feedback in the classroom, Part 2 looks at feedback to teachers and Part 3 explores feedback at the organisational level.

A FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSING FEEDBACK FOR LEARNING

Any evaluation of the usefulness of feedback must rest on an analysis of its purpose, the assumptions about learning on which it is based and a recognition that feedback has different purposes. Theoretical models help make common-sense assumptions about feedback explicit and open them up to analysis. Table 1.1 sets out three different models of teaching and related views of learning, and explores the goals which inform them: receptive-transmission; constructive; co-constructive.

THE RECEPTIVE–TRANSMISSION MODEL

This model of teaching and learning is described as receptivetransmission because these terms describe the states of the learner and the teacher. The teacher is an expert in a particular field and gives information to a passive recipient. In this model the curriculum is a body of worthwhile knowledge to which everyone is entitled (Hirst 1974), defined by the educational establishment, workplace or state. The transmission of this knowledge is the primary task of teaching, delivering concepts and facts. The curriculum content is non-negotiable, focuses on the cognitive and stresses the importance of rational thinking, that is objective, abstract, logical, sequential thinking. Dominant until the end of the 1950s, the receptive-transmission model still relates most closely to practice in educational establishments and accords with a mechanistic view of learning and organisations. A UNESCO report describes four kinds of essential learning: learning to know, learning to live together, learning to be and learning to do and suggests that educational methods currently pay disproportionate attention to the first type of learning (International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century 1996).

The failure to take an holistic approach to the educational needs of students is serious in a technological age. Knowledge soon becomes out of date. Young people need to be flexible, to make connections between their learning in one sphere and learning in another and to apply their learning to different situations. The model does not stress connections between different bodies of knowledge, between knowledge and personal experience. Indeed, it makes a distinction between the learner and what is to be learned (Prawat 1992). Emotional and social aspects of learning are not addressed and what the learner brings to the learning situation is unacknowledged or accorded no value. Consequently, issues of social justice or social transformation are not recognised or addressed.

Table 1.1 Models of teaching, views of learning and related discourses on feedback

This model fixes people in distinct roles. Learners are themselves divided according to perceptions of ‘ability’. This in turn affects their perceptions of themselves as learners, for example, by disaffiliating them from the system of education. We know that teachers make early assessments of the ability of their pupils and ‘ability differences are always apparently construed by teachers as stable’ (Cooper and McIntyre 1996: 16). Those seen as successful in this model may be disadvantaged, as Hoffer suggests:

In times of change learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world which no longer exists.

(Hoffer E. cited in MacGilchrist et al. 1997)

FEEDBACK IN THE DOMINANT DISCOURSE – THE GIFT

We characterise feedback in this model as a gift from the teacher to the learner. The teacher is viewed as expert in this discourse and feedback is one-way communication, from teacher to student, to provide information to help the student learn. The information is usually evaluative and may indicate the gap between current performance and desired outcomes.

Everyday use of ‘feedback’ is congruent with this dominant view of teaching and learning. It fits very neatly with the current educational policy discourse and therefore notions of feedback are popular at the moment. Educational priorities including target setting and performance management are based on a mechanistic, rationalist view of how to raise standards. They have in common a focus on external, rather than internal mechanisms for judging worth. They favour decisionmaking and critical judgement by others over self-reflection and self-awareness. They foster dependence rather than independence or interdependence and encourage notions of failure/success, wrong/right. Current policy priorities do not foster an environment in which individuals or organisations are encouraged to risk making mistakes, to experiment or to be creative, the very things which are necessary for learning, development and progress (Seltzer and Bentley 1999).

We are familiar with feedback in this climate. It is given and received in many settings – solicited or not. Interview panels feel obliged to provide feedback to people who were not chosen for the job. OFSTED inspectors give verbal and then written feedback following an inspection of a school’s performance. Mentors give beginner teachers feedback following observations of their performance in the classroom. Teachers and tutors give students feedback on draft assignments. Trainers ask for feedback following a course. Researchers provide evaluation reports for projects. Management training courses give advice on how to give ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ feedback and, more rarely, how to receive it.

In this discourse, feedback is a judgement about the performance of another. Feedback is given and received in the belief that the recipient will be able to adjust subsequent performances. It is assumed that the person giving the information knows more than the person receiving it, that the person receiving the information does not already know it, that they want to hear the information and this knowledge will lead to improvement. There is an expectation that feedback automatically leads to learning, but how learning can result from the gift of feedback is rarely considered problematic.

Feedback in the reception–transmission model can promote learning in some circumstances and with particular characteristics. Improvement is more likely to follow when part of a strategy which is understood by both teacher and learner (Clarke, this volume). The quality of the relationship between the giver and the receiver is significant in leading to learning (Carnell, this volume). Hargreaves, McCallum and Gipps (this volume) also explore effective ways of giving feedback within the dominant model.

Feedback which is intended to provide information and increase understanding is necessary when something is not for negotiation, when it is important to relate rules within a social context or social conventions regarding work and behaviour, and to indicate the consequences of not complying with conventions. But where we want to engage people in a deeper process of understanding, making connections, further insights or learning about their learning, this form of feedback is less effective.

We have coined the phrase ‘killer feedback’ to describe situations when the receptive–transmission form of feedback blocks learning. Both authors have experienced receiving such feedback on writing. The feedback was intended to be constructive and developmental, but its effect was to discourage all further redrafting. This was because there was too much and it felt overpowering, it did not connect with our thinking at the time, there was no discussion or dialogue and it did not give any help in how to start making changes. It felt as if the person giving the feedback had their own purposes and goals for our writing.

In everyday use, positive feedback refers to judgements implying satisfaction with the learner’s performance and negative feedback implies criticism and the need for changes. The recipient is assumed to welcome the former and the fear the latter. Our experience of killer feedback points to different conceptions of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ feedback. We suggest that ‘positive’ feedback is only positive if it helps learning. The impact of positive feedback may be to motivate, for example, by increasing confidence, making new meaning, increasing understanding, helping to make links and connections. Negative feedback demotivates, for example, by discouraging, being overly judgemental, critical, giving unclear or contradictory messages and encouraging dependence on others for assessing progress. It is the experience of the recipient of the feedback which determines whether the gift is positive or negative.

So-called ‘positive’ feedback may prove to be unhelpful. Many teachers have a belief that praise forms an important function in motivating, rewarding and enhancing self-esteem. The review by Brophy (1981) indicates that giving praise in a general or indiscriminate way may be unhelpful, and may even lead to lower self-esteem and loss of confidence.

Infrequent but contingent, specific, and credible praise seems more likely to be encouraging . . . than frequent, trivial or inappropriate praise. Rather than just assume its effectiveness, teachers who wish to praise effectively will have to assess how individual students respond to praise, and in particular, how they mediate its meanings and use it to make attributions about their abilities and about the linkages between their efforts and the outcomes of those efforts.

(Brophy 1981: 27)

Feedback in the dominant model may also encourage comparison and competitiveness. The belief that comparisons between individuals encourage people to work harder to achieve their goals needs to be challenged. Comparison can lead to competition and may result in some individuals giving up, feeling they are failures and evaluating their abilities negatively. A review of research on formative assessment and learning recommends:

Feedback to any pupil should be about the particular qualities of his or her work, with advice on what he or she can do to improve, and should avoid comparisons with other pupils.

(Black and Wiliam 1998: 9)

One of the problems of the receptive–transmission model is that the person giving feedback can too easily become locked into stereotypes relating to gender, ethnicity, class and ability. Dweck shows how feedback in the receptive–transmission model can reflect the teachers’ assumptions about girls and boys and their beliefs in their differing ‘abilities’.

Girls attributed failure to lack of ability rather than motivation; this was because teachers’ feedback to boys and girls was such that it would lead to girls feeling less able, while allowing boys to explain their failure through lack of effort or poor behaviour. This reaction to feedback was only so for teacher feedback; peer feedback did not have this stereotypical effect.

(Dweck et al. 1978, cited in Gipps 1995)

So far we have largely been discussing feedback given by ‘experts’ to others who are usually in a less powerful position. The dictionary definitions of feedback include ‘information in response to an inquiry’. A different model of feedback which fits this definition is when the taught give information to the teacher in order for them to learn more about their professional practice. Teachers may ask for feedback from students at the end of a term or course. This book includes research with young people which sought to gather their views to feedback to their teachers about their careers education (MacDonald, this volume) and young people’s feedback about how others support their learning (Carnell, this volume). The pupils’ viewpoint should be highly valued because ‘what pupils say about teaching, learning and schooling is not only worth listening to but provides an important – perhaps the most important – foundation for thinking about ways of improving sc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and tables
• Contributors
• 1 Gifts, ping-pong and loops – linking feedback and learning
• Part 1 Feedback for young people's learning
• Part 2 Feedback for teachers' learning
• Part 3 Feedback for organisational learning
• Index