Based Learning 6: FBL - Feedback-Based Learning

FBL: Feedback-Based Learning

Feedback is vital in just about all learning contexts. How children learn from positive and negative performance feedback lies at the foundation of successful learning and is therefore of great importance for educational practice.

Feedback in Student Learning:

1. Feedback is linked to the development of competence.
2. Feedback Contexts: Teaching, Learning, and Assessments.
3. Feedback comes from Fellow Learners, Tutors, Trainers, Instructors, Expert Witnesses.
4. Feedback happens: After the event, or during the event, or both; Even in the absence of any learning action; To cause a learning event to take place thereafter.

Feedback Kinds:

1. Positive Feedback - Embraces praise: Some shrug it off in a bid to demonstrate modesty. It is most effective when we take ownership of it, and swell with pride about it. Need to help our students become more adept at making the most of the positive feedback they receive.
2. Negative Feedback - Critical or constructive: Human beings are often not too adept at making the best use of critical feedback. We may instinctively become defensive, and close the doors to really analyzing the feedback and adapting our actions on the basis of it. Yet learning by trial and error is a perfectly natural and valid way of learning and depends on making optimum use of feedback about mistakes.

Feedback Attributes:

1. Timely: The sooner the better. Ideally, feedback should be received within a day or two, and even better almost straight away.
2. Intimate: Feedback needs to fit each student's achievement, individual nature, and personality.
3. Empowering: We need to make sure it doesn't dampen learning down. We need to look carefully at how best we can make critical feedback equally empowering to learners.
4. Detailed: Feedback should open doors, not close them. Words like 'weak' or 'poor' cause irretrievable breakdowns in the communication between assessor and student. Even positive words such as 'excellent' can cause problems when feedback on the next piece of work is only 'very good' - why wasn't it excellent again? In all such cases, it is better to praise exactly what was very good or excellent in a little more detail, rather than take the short cut of just using the adjectives themselves.
5. Manageable: There are two sides to this. From our point of view, designing and delivering feedback to students could easily consume all the time and energy we have - it is an endless task. But also, from students' point of view, getting too much feedback can result in them not being able to sort out the important feedback from the routine feedback, reducing their opportunity to benefit from the feedback they need most.

Feedback Forms:

1. Hand-Written: It includes our written feedback on essays, reports, dissertations, solutions to problems, and so on, usually accompanied by an assessment judgment of one kind or another.

Advantages:

• Can be personal, individual, and directly related to the particular piece of work;
• May be regarded as authoritative and credible;
• Can be tailored to justify an accompanying assessment judgment;
• Students can refer to the feedback again and again, and continue to learn from it;
• Provides useful evidence for external scrutiny.

Disadvantages:

• Can be hard to read;
• When critical - because of its authoritativeness - can be threatening;
• It is slow and time-consuming to write individually on (or about) students' work, and hard to make time for when class sizes are large;
• You can't refer to your own feedback to different students unless you keep photocopies of their work and your comments;
• It becomes too tempting to degenerate into shorthand - ticks and crosses - rather than to express positive and critical comments.

2. Word-Processed: Which you compose, then print out, for each student, summarizing your reactions to their work, accompanied by an assessment judgment.

Advantages:

• Can remain individual, personal and authoritative;
• Easier to include pre-prepared statements, using 'cut and paste';
• Students can refer to it time and time again;
• Easier to read;
• Can keep copies (paper or electronic) and refer to it easily again;
• Provides useful evidence for external scrutiny.

Disadvantages:

• Can still be threatening to students when critical;
• May appear less personal to students than handwritten feedback;
• Not so easy to link each feedback point to the exact part of the work which caused you to write it;
• The 'cut and paste' elements may show up too strongly to external reviewers, if they have been used too widely;
• Not so easy to make emphasis in word-processed feedback, so that the most important messages stand out from those that are merely routine.

3. Model Answers: Covers a wide range of feedback aids, including model answers, perhaps supported by 'commentary' notes highlighting principal matters arising with students' work as a whole, worked solutions to calculations or problems, and so on.

Advantages:

• Students can use model answers to revisit their own work in self-assessment mode, and can continue to use them as a frame of reference illustrating the standards they are working towards;
• Can save you a lot of time writing individual feedback or explanation to students;
• Can be issued to students who missed an assignment, or for reference by students who may have been exempted from it;
• Constitute useful evidence of standards and expectations, both for students and for external quality reviewers.

Disadvantages:

• Because model answers or solutions are relatively impersonal, some students will not really engage in comparing their own work to them;
• Students who do the assignment equally well overall, but in different ways, may feel that their individuality is not being valued or recognized;
• Students may assume that the model answers represent all that they need to know about the topic on which the assignment was based;
• Students who missed out an important aspect of their own work may not notice the significance of this, and may still need further feedback about their own particular strengths and weaknesses;
• If the same assignment is used again within a year or two, there may be clear evidence that the model answers are still in circulation!

4. Face-to-Face: It includes one-to-one appointments with students, individual discussions out of class or in practical settings, and so on. Can also include giving oral feedback to a whole class after having marked their assignments, before or after returning their actual work to them.

Advantages:

• Feedback is likely to be found to be personal, intimate and authoritative;
• Can address student's needs, strengths and weaknesses;
• Can give a lot of feedback to a lot of students in a relatively short time;
• Feedback is strengthened by tone of voice, facial expression, body language, emphasis, and so on;
• Students can compare reactions to your feedback, especially when you use some discussion in the process.

Disadvantages:

• One-to-one face-to-face feedback can be extremely threatening when critical;
• Students may become defensive when receiving critical feedback, and you may feel tempted to go in harder to justify the feedback;
• Students can be embarrassed when receiving positive feedback, and this can cause them not to fully benefit from praise;
• Students often tend to remember only some of a feedback interview with an important person like you, often the most critical element, and this may undermine confidence unduly;
• It becomes impossible to remember exactly what you said to whom when class sizes are large.

Resources to Implement FBL:

1. Edutopia: http://www.edutopia.org/blog/providing-feedback-as-formative-assessment-troy-hicks
2. Feedback Info-graphics: http://elearninginfographics.com/tag/feedback-infographic/
3. Edmodo: https://spotlight.edmodo.com/product/based-learning-6-fbl-feedback-based-learning--385339/