More on How Students Do and Don’t Use Feedback

It's not the first time we've addressed the issue: why don't students use our feedback to improve their performance (their writing, their exams, their professional skills)? A revisit is justified because it's such an important question and because answers are more elusive than we might expect. However, good resources can be helpful, and the one referenced here falls into that category. As the author notes, “a vast number” of articles on feedback in educational contexts have been published. He aspired to do a comprehensive review of the literature but, as with so many educational topics now, that is all but impossible to do. His particular interest is “empirical research on students' use of feedback in higher education” (p. 65) and the feedback that teachers provide students. His review ends up considering 103 peer-reviewed studies published since 1990. The bulk of those studies focused on the feedback contained in comments on students' written work. Although there is great diversity in these studies and a plethora of individual findings, some contradictory, he identifies five themes or “challenges” that emerge from this collection of studies. They are explored in more detail in the article, and the various studies with findings relevant to the challenge are cited. Feedback needs to be useful—Bottom line: students don't respond to feedback that they don't perceive as being useful. That includes short, one-word or short-phrase comments, and it includes those situations when there is no opportunity to act on the feedback. That's what typically happens when students submit papers at the end of a course. The course is over, there is no opportunity to use the feedback, and if that's the first feedback students have received from the teacher, providing it is pretty much a wasted effort. Students prefer specific, detailed, and individualized feedback—When asked about their feedback preferences, students say they want a lot of feedback (19 studies are listed that identify this preference), but in studies that have analyzed their actual use of the feedback, “the length of the comments does not necessarily influence whether students address it.” The problem here seems to be that students want feedback that tells them exactly what they need to do; they don't want to have to figure that out for themselves. Their assumption is that if they do exactly what the teacher says, then the changes they make will be positively reflected in a better grade. However, doing exactly what the teacher says does not necessarily promote learning. In fact, “there are indications that less-specific, detailed, and personal feedback, which requires the students to actively engage with the feedback … may be more productive to learning.” (p. 68) Authoritarian feedback is not productive—If teachers offer authoritarian advice, students will do what the teacher says and not learn much, if anything, from the feedback. So the better approach is to take “‘the part of a dialogue partner' who doesn't use imperatives and gives mainly evaluative comments.” (p. 69) However, as long as the teacher is the one giving the grades, a significant amount of that teacher authority remains. Even if the teacher makes constructive suggestions on a paper, students are still motivated to try to figure out what the teacher wants and not see the larger implications of the feedback in terms of improved writing overall. Students may lack strategies for the productive use of feedback—The question here is one of know-how. If students understand the feedback but still aren't able to fix the problem, then they don't use the feedback. According to the research cited, when students lack the strategies necessary to deal with the feedback, they respond with more diffuse strategies: they will “try harder” on their next paper, they plan to “go over” their notes more often, or they make a “mental note” not to use such and such a phrase in their next essay. There is some promising research cited that when given explicit guidance on how to use feedback, students' revision skills improved. Students may lack an understanding of academic terminology or jargon—Eleven studies are cited that document that “many students have problems understanding the meaning of the terms teachers use, or the criteria that teachers make reference to.” (p. 69) Model answers or exemplars with the feedback help students with this problem, as do rubrics and the opportunity to talk about the feedback with the teacher. Given limitations identified in the article, “a tentative conclusion from this review is that, in order to aid students in using feedback more productively, the transmission model of feedback—where the teacher passes on information to the student—needs to be replaced with a more active and dialogic model of feedback.” (p. 72) Reference: Jonsson, A. (2013). Facilitating productive use of feedback in higher education. Active Learning in Higher Education, 14 (1), 63-76.