Importance of Teacher's Feedback - Essay Example

Importance of Feedback Importance of Feedback Feedback is a means used to guide towards improving by relaying information concerning their inability and ability to comprehend matters. Feedback goes hand in hand with teachers’ praise, which is according an individual high value by commending their worth and expressing approval and admiration. A teacher’s praise affects an individual’s behaviour more positively and has more detailed and intense response than feedback (Walsh & Sattes 2010). In the context of learning and teaching, feedback is viewed as a form of a teacher’s response to students’ attitude, performance or behaviour. Feedback is not only a result of a student’s performance, but also a vital component in the process of learning. However, feedback on performance should not be confused with self-esteem boost and positive reinforcement. There is spoken and written feedback. It can also be gestural that indicates encouragement, approval or criticism (Askew 2009). There is scope for peers to relay feedback to one another and it is termed as student-student feedback. Students also provide teachers with feedback concerning their performance and it is known as student-teacher feedback. The teachers can attain feedback from their peers regarding their performance and this is referred to as teacher-teacher feedback. Feedback is therefore very important in schools and it performs various functions that include; correcting, recognizing, challenging, encouraging and improving the student performance (Walsh & Sattes 2010). A competent mentor or teacher should readily demonstrate, give explanations and detect performance flaws. Poor teaching takes longer and is less effective. Learners who are not corrected, encouraged or instructed are disillusioned and do not progress. Feedback is a significant aid in classroom management and can be negative if it discourages student achievements and efforts. In other cases, bad feedback is worse than none at all (Askew 2009). A teacher’s good feedback is anything that strengthens the capacity of the students to self-regulate and review their own performances. There are several principles that describe a teacher’s extent on practices of good feedback. A good feedback practice aids in clarifying the definition of good performance in terms of criteria, goals and expected standards. A student will only achieve set learning goals by understanding them, assuming their ownership and assessing progress. Comprehending goals require an overlap degree between the teachers’s set goals and those of the student (Boyle & Nicol 2003). If the teacher’s and the student’s goal assessment conceptions are not similar, then there is no connection in the received feedback information. Therefore, there is need for other strategies that will complement verbal explanations and written materials. Such strategies in standards, criteria and goals clarification include; providence of requirement definitions by use of constructed sheets of criteria, heighten reflection and discussion about criteria and involvement of students in exercises where they assess, comment or mark their colleagues work depending on the given criteria or standard. Such strategies increase self-regulation levels (Boyle & Nicol 2003). Another principle regarding a teacher’s good feedback is facilitating self-reflection development in learning. Teachers are entitled to create increasingly structured opportunities for purposes of self-monitoring and judgement of goal progression. Self-assessing tasks are effective in achieving this as well as activities that focus on reflection on progressive learning. Other examples emphasizing this include asking students for suggestions regarding the types of feedbacks they would want after handing in their work and identifying the weaknesses and strength in their personal work in relation to standards or criteria before delivering it for feedback from the teacher (Black et al 2003). Another important aspect is that the teacher delivers good and quality information about the students’ learning. Research indicates that teachers play a major role in the students’ capacity for regulating themselves and are vital source of feedback that is external. The teacher-student feedback is effective in misconception or errors identification when reviewing students’ work than their peers. It helps in substantiating self-regulation of the student. External feedback of good quality has information that assists students in trouble shooting their self-correction and personal performance. A good teacher encourages and enhances peer dialogue while learning. In order to achieve this, a student-teacher dialogue should be more of a dialogue than transmission of information. A meaningful dialogue is the one where the student engages the teacher in discussing issues regarding the feedback. Some studies insist that dialogue between a student and a teacher is very essential for feedback effectiveness in higher learning. Discussing with a teacher helps the student develop understanding of standards and expectations (Askew 2009). The other need for a teacher’s meaningful feedback is encouraging self-esteem, and motivational beliefs that are positive. These play a very significant role in assessment and learning. Most often than not, learning beliefs determine different frameworks of motivation. These frameworks usually affect the responses of the student regarding external feedback and together with their commitment towards self-regulation in learning. Strategies that aid in attaining high motivation and esteem levels include; automated feedback testing, resubmissions and drafts, providing grades and marks after student’s response to feedback and allowing re-writing of selected student’s work to aid in changing their expectations( Black et al. 2003). The teacher’s feedback should be able to give opportunities that allow bridging desired and current performance gap. Unless students exhibit ability in using feedback in order to produce quality and improved work like by repeating the similar assignment, neither the student nor the teacher giving feedback will get to know if it was effective or not. Therefore, bridging the gap is all about students support while learning and giving them opportunities to re-do the assignment and resubmit (Harris 2002). Good feedback avails information to teachers, which is used in shaping the teaching. The assessment has effects on the student as well as the assessor. The assessors being the teachers learn the extent of the students’ expertise and can therefore re-establish their mode of teaching accordingly. Strategies that a teacher can use to collate and generate meaningful information regarding student learning are; allowing students to identify areas they have difficulties in during work assessments, question asking regarding taught chapters, and allowing students to request for the feedback they would want when submitting assignments (Craven, Marsh & Debus 1991). There are communication problems in all institutions and recognizing these effective communication barriers is the beginning of communication styles improvement. These communication problems are amongst students, teachers and even the support staff. Some of this barriers include, lack of receiver sensitivity which occurs when a teacher’s message is not well adapted to the student. Recognition of the student’s status, needs, language skills and subject knowledge helps the teacher prepare successful message (Black et al. 2003). Deficiency of basic skills of communication that shows when the student has trouble understanding information because the teacher has problems selecting the appropriate words and expressing them in the desired way for the students’ comprehension. If the teacher does not have sufficient knowledge of a subject, this becomes another barrier for effective learning and communicating. The students are confused and mixed up and the outcome feedback is disastrous (Askew 2009). A teacher should be able to consolidate information in simple and clear presentation for easier understanding. Otherwise, if the given content is overloaded with information, a barrier ensues since one is unable to take in and interpret all that is in the information. Emotions should be set aside as their interference bars good communication. If a teacher is resentful, angry and hostile, the emotional preoccupation might lead to distortion of the intended message and the vice versa for students. Psychological factors like a teacher’s or student’s state of mind can also pose as barriers in that information is very well received if either party is happy and the reverse of the same is true. Differences in languages and cultures are also barriers in that during communication, interpretation will be entirely different because of different frames of language and reference. This causes many misunderstandings and therefore very poor feedback (Black et al. 2003). Higher education tutors are being encouraged to enhance provision of assessed work feedback to students to facilitate improvement and promote learning. This is achieved by effectively using comments on submitted work and relating criteria. Assessments and feedbacks are important tools that aid in students’ progress and their learning from mistakes. Students prefer verbal feedback as opposed to written feedback. This is because they feel that verbal feedback encourages discussions and questioning with the teacher. In fact, most of the students claimed not to have read the written comments (Walsh & Sattes 2010). Students use feedbacks for various purposes such as motivation. Feedback offers students motivation by stimulating and encouraging them to pursue learning of topics in a fashion that is independent. Negative comments can also steer motivation. Students have a desire to understand a subject and to succeed and this leads to higher comprehension levels. Feedback helps students develop and enhance their confidence to even approach lecturers and discuss their studies with them. Students do not find feedback being detrimental (Harris 2002). Another role of feedback to student is that they use it to enhance their learning. It is used as a guidance while improving and correcting assignments. This is an indicator that learners are contextualising the feedback and thereby developing wider awareness. Feedback helps the students to perceive learning as progressive and developmental. The tutors’ data analysis shows that students experience learning in a fashion that is pragmatic (Butler 1987). Feedback also enhances student reflection since with it; they gain great insights within the context of study. Feedback normally makes students spend more time concentrating on the concerned subject and gives them an opportunity to carry on ideas from the current assignment to others in future. Some students also discuss their different comments from the lecturers in a group in order to understand what is exactly required of them (Angelo and Cross 1993). Students further view feedback as a means of clarification and as an indicator for performance. Some feedbacks appear like specific information regarding specific performances in an assignment. They also tend to clarify the expectation of the tutor based on the assignment performance of a student. It further clarifies expectations in different academic levels and highlights mistakes and omissions. Students feel that they would benefit from getting information about the expected feedback prior to starting the assignment. They argue that it will assist in restructuring the assignment as per the tutor’s instructions. Other students were concerned with the means the tutors used to convey feedback. Their proposal is that feedback should be specific about a certain subject as opposed to general comments (Schmoker & Wilson 1993). Several factors affect how students react to feedback from the teacher. They include preference of written comments from the teacher. The students feel that with the written feedback, the teacher informs them of their work’s quality other than grammatical accuracy. They need feedbacks regarding issues of organization and content. For multiple-draft contexts requiring students to make use of comments for writing improvement, students react differently to written comments (Butler 1987). The other factor is that they have different preferences regarding error feedback. Some students would not mind the exposure of their inadequacies whereas others are against it. The overall differential preference of error feedback results from individual differences like motivation and proficiency level (Harris 2002). There is the factor of demanding more effort from teachers and student passiveness. Teachers respond comprehensively to errors while marking and this leaves the learners without an opportunity for self or peer evaluation. Students therefore become extremely reliant on the teacher and want teachers to indicate error types and corrections while marking. This proves that teachers’ feedbacks directly influence student expectation and reaction. Feedback practices that are dominated by the teacher results to dependent and passive learners (Craven, Marsh & Debus 1991). Students do not always understand a teacher’s feedback and this leads the focus to students’ uptake of the teacher’s feedback factor. If a teacher approaches students with low motivation, they do not take the feedback seriously neither do they find it useful. Learners tend to have an overall reaction to a teacher’s feedback other than an individual reaction. The quality of feedback also determines its perception (Schmoker & Wilson 1993). The teaching practice has been through assessments to make improvements. Teachers require an improvement to pedagogical knowledge of content in order to make the appropriate adjustments regarding classroom practice. The entire school fraternity should engage in evidence-informed systemic cycles for building knowledge that is relevant. These cycles identify the skills and knowledge needed by students to bridge the gap what they know and what they do not know. Assessing the curriculum is important in order to analyse the learning needs of the students. The data obtained from such assessments is very useful in achieving the stated objectives. The teacher is required to deepen and advance their knowledge professionally since it will influence the students’ outcomes (Angelo and Cross 1993). In summary, feedback is essential in a student’s education scope. The learners’ response to different feedback types is a good assessment tool of their effectiveness. The reactions to teacher feedback by students are determined by factors that are beyond an act of feedback by an individual. Students are termed as active agents in the process of feedbacks. In the several analysis and assessment of feedback, it is revealed that a student’s attitude and reactions towards a teacher’s feedback is a matter of intricacy (Angelo and Cross 1993). This matter intertwines the character of the student with teachers’ factors like practices and beliefs. The teachers should listen and accommodate the needs of the student and they should include students’ perceptions and expectations in their decision-making. Feedback influences students’ encouragement concerning viewing reflection as an assignment process. A positive feedback from a tutor, and one that emphasises the rationale and the purpose for the task. It should also relate the task in helpful course objectives (Schmoker & Wilson 1993). Teachers should emphasize on the feedback roles. It should not just come after completion of an assignment but should be integrated and put in context in the overall learning of the student. A learner’s utilization of teacher’s feedback is an earned skill. Students should be encouraged to have discussions among themselves about their teacher’s feedback to enhance further understanding. Teachers must evaluate the students’ response to their feedback as this increases their awareness of their students’ learning and they might alter their mode of relaying feedbacks to most effective ones. References Angelo, T. and Cross, P., 1993. Classroom Assessment Techniques. New York: Jossey-Bass Askew, S., 2009. Feedback for Learning. New York: Routledge Butler, R., 1987. Task-involving and ego-involving properties of evaluation: effects of different feedback conditions on motivational perceptions, interest and performance. Journal of Educational Psychology. 78(4), pp.210-216 Boyle, J.T. and Nicol, D. J., 2003. Using classroom communication systems to support interaction and discussion in large class settings. Association for Learning Technology Journal. 11(3), pp.43-57 Black, P. et al., 2003. Assessment for Learning: putting it into practice. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press Craven, R.G., Marsh, H. W. & Debus, R.L. 1991. Effects of internally focused feedback on the enhancement of academic self-concept. Journal of Educational Psychology. 83(1), pp.17-27. Harris, A., 2002. School Improvement. New York: Routledge Schmoker, M.J. & Wilson, R.B., 1993. Total quality education. Bloomington: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation Walsh, J.A. & Sattes, B.D., 2010. Leading Through Quality Questioning. California: Corwin Press Read More