R3 1.15 August 9, 2023 What Do Students Think of the Feedback They Get, and What Do They Do About It?
What Do Students Think of the Feedback They Get, and What Do They Do About It?
For this issue of R3, we’re taking a breather from looking at work on AI and ChatGPT to focus on some other topics that relate to almost any type of college teaching. The article I’ll be reviewing takes on feedback and what students do with it, something that we should be considering as we build or refresh our courses for the coming semester.
Citation:
Zepeda, C. D., Ortegren, F. R., & Butler, A. C. (2023). Learning from feedback in college courses: Student practices, beliefs, and preferences. Applied Cognitive Psychology, June, 1–20.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.4118
Paywall or Open:
Paywall
Summary:
Most research on feedback and learning has focused on finer points of timing and content. This article seeks to fill a gap in the literature by examining students’ subjective experience of the feedback they get in college courses. This includes student self-reports of how they process frustrating or negative feedback, linking these responses to self-regulated learning and self-motivation strategies (e.g., using feedback to motivate oneself to do well on future coursework). Overall, student perceptions of feedback were positive, and there were a wide variety of positive actions students reported taking on the basis of feedback.
Research Questions:
What kinds of feedback do students report receiving in typical college courses?
What kinds of actions do students take based on feedback, especially if it’s frustrating or negative?
What perceptions and preferences do students have about the feedback they get?
Sample:
Three hundred seventy-eight current students at colleges and universities within the United States, recruited via an online research panel. The sample of respondents was 47% male and 53% female, averaging 24.58 years old. Respondents were predominantly White and high-GPA.
Method/Design:
Survey questions asked respondents about feedback at several different levels of specificity: across all courses, within a specific example course of their choosing, and specific tasks within that chosen course. Questions focused on the type of feedback received, how respondents used the feedback, motivational/self-regulation strategies students used to cope with frustrating feedback, and general beliefs and preferences involving feedback.
Key Findings:
Students generally felt that immediate feedback was more effective, and on average, that it lost effectiveness after about 12 days. Positive self-regulation strategies were commonly reported, and students also generally perceived the feedback they were getting as helpful, high-quality, and something they could implement. There were wide variations in exactly what students did with what kind of feedback, ranging from skimming over correct and incorrect items, to discussing it with instructors or peers. Most (approximately 65-75% across different assignment types) reported using it in some way to improve in the future.
Choice Quote from the Article:
Students in this study clearly value the feedback that they receive. At the general level, they thought feedback was important and liked receiv- ing feedback. At the course level, these values were also evident as they had positive views about the utility (useful for the future, valuable), com- position (helpful, not disappointed, detailed), and implementation (given opportunities and were able to address) of the feedback provided in the course. Although students nominated the courses that they tended to perform well in (lots of A's, fewer B's, not too many with C's or below), it is important to note that regardless of how they performed, students generally viewed the feedback positively. Aligned with prior work (J. Brown, 2007; Harris et al., 2014), these results suggest that students are satisfied with and generally appreciate the feedback.
Why it Matters:
This is an up-to-the moment take on feedback and what students think of it. The literature review offers a clear and substantive summary of the state of play as far as what we currently do and don’t know about feedback. Even for those with some background on this topic, this provides a helpful refresher, with explanations of important distinctions such as task-specific feedback vs. process-level feedback, and feedback on tests vs. other types of coursework. I concur with the authors’ point that most previous research on feedback has been situated within highly controlled laboratory-type studies, and the present one, focusing as it does on real college students talking about their actual classes, provides an important counterpoint.
I also appreciated the list of motivational/self-regulation strategies for coping with feedback, which the authors designed around major theories of academic motivation. I predict that many readers will gravitate toward this section in particular; it’s also interesting that the authors included some negative or maladaptive “strategies” such as defensive pessimism or procrastination, along with the positive ones like reminding oneself that future improvement is possible. The authors make a good point that there’s opportunity for addressing this aspect of learning in more detail, suggesting that it could be a good use of time to help students understand how to use feedback productively within different types of courses.
Lastly, this article is simply motivating for instructors themselves as they contemplate the hours of grading involved in even a single assignment in a typical college class. I say this because overall, perceptions of feedback were so strongly positive, and respondents stated the did actually act on it (although in a wide variety of different ways). It’s particularly heartening that respondents endorsed the value of personalized feedback, saying that these types of comments tended to be encouraging.
Most Relevant For:
Instructional designers; faculty engaged in course redesign or other efforts to enhance instruction; researchers interested in feedback and learning; ed tech designers; graduate teaching assistants and others responsible for grading large amounts of student work
Limitations, Caveats, and Nagging Questions:
As you might guess from the journal where the work appeared (Applied Cognitive Psychology), the emphasis here is on the cognitive appraisals and reactions to feedback, not the emotional or social ones. However, it’s interesting that the work does have some crossover, especially when it comes to motivation – which has both emotional (feeling) and cognitive (strategic, self-talk, purposive) components to it.
The authors do acknowledge that when selecting a course to focus on for purposes of the survey, respondents may have been predisposed to choose courses that they particularly liked. This could skew the results a bit more toward positive perceptions overall. Subsidiary analyses do show that feedback was viewed more positively when the course grade was higher, although this trend isn’t as dramatic as you might assume.
One of the questions raised by the work – and this is not a bad thing – is how instructors might use these findings to target feedback and make grading more efficient. An evergreen concern about the practicalities of grading is the perception, among instructors, that much of their carefully crafted feedback goes to waste, either because students don’t use it effectively or don’t look at it at all. Table 5 in particular shows some interesting patterns with respect to what students do with different specific kinds of assignment feedback, which could inform choices about where best to allocate effort when it comes to grades.
If you liked this article, you might also appreciate:
Abel, M., & Bäuml, K. H. T. (2020). Would you like to learn more? Retrieval practice plus feedback can increase motivation to keep on studying. Cognition, 201(March), 104316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104316
Butler, A. C., Godbole, N., & Marsh, E. J. (2013). Explanation feedback is better than correct answer feedback for promoting transfer of learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(2), 290–298. https://doi. org/10.1037/a0031026
Butler, A. C., Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2007). The effect of type and timing of feedback on learning from multiple-choice tests. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 13(4), 273–281. https://doi.org/ 10.1037/1076-898X.13.4.273
McDaniel, M. A., Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (2007). Generalizing test-enhanced learning from the laboratory to the classroom. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14(2), 200–206. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194052
Van der Kleij, F. M., Feskens, R. C. W., & Eggen, T. J. H. M. (2015). Effects of feedback in a computer-based learning environment on students’ learning outcomes: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 85(4), 475–511. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654314564881
Yuan, J., & Kim, C. (2015). Effective feedback design using free technologies. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 52(3), https://doi.org/10.1177/0735633115571929
File under: grading, ungrading, feedback, self-regulation, motivation