There's so much written about the power of feedback, including John Hattie's very famous article on the matter. It's given a really high effect size of 0.8, but what does this mean?

I've asked a group of teachers what they mean by "feedback" and I got a completely different answer from each one. This possibly shows the weakness of meta-analysis for guiding teacher practice.

Students get so much feedback, but how much of it actually improves their learning?

Far too much feedback is summative, used for compliance purposes, rather than formative, responsive, and part of the teaching and learning cycle at the moment it can make the most difference. Even more concerning, particularly in the secondary space, is the fact that students often don't get a chance to act on feedback because we move on to the next unit of material.

This is even more reason why feedback needs to be more in the moment and less after the fact. So we're probably giving too much feedback of the wrong type.

Hattie talks about feedback at four levels: the product, the process, the metacognitive level, and the self. He believes the most effective feedback is at the process and metacognitive levels.

Our work helps to provide feedback at the process level. If you write a framework for learning dispositions, you can also target the metacognitive level, although this is more contested as to whether it's a separate thing from the domains under which it operates.

Too much feedback focuses just on the product, saying you missed this or you did this wrong, or at the self-level: good job, great effort, dot dot dot. We shouldn't really be commenting on learners as people, certainly not in written comments.

So the best kind of feedback is advice about how to get better at the process of something. Give advice that gives students something to think about after reading your feedback.

Most importantly, get students to act on the feedback they get. Give them a chance to redo the task or do a similar task. Also, get them to explain what they've understood about the feedback in their own words.

One great way to do this is to give verbal feedback and get the learner to write down what they've understood from that feedback. That serves two purposes. The learner takes on the feedback and incorporates it because they've written it in their own words, and it also gives information to the teacher about whether their feedback is being understood.

It's inefficient for teachers to give heaps of feedback that doesn't get used and doesn't improve learning, especially considering how much time teachers spend on it.

So we probably need to give less feedback, make it more targeted, and create more opportunities for students to use the feedback we give.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash