Feedback: Putting More Air in the Balloon

I received Better Evidence-Based Education, published by John's Hopkins School of Education, in the mail and was thrilled to see that this issue is entitled: Assessment, and it is packed with resources on the topic of my summer investigation.  While skimming through the titles, the first one to catch my eye is "Formative Assessment and Feedback to Learners" by Steve Higgins, a professor of Education at Durham University.

Higgins begins the article by stating its purpose:

One of the questions that teachers have frequently asked me for the review is was about what works in terms of formative assessment and feedback to students.

I love when an author's purpose for writing is so closely aligned with my purpose for reading.

Though it is a bit of an aside, one analogy that caught my attention was comparing test prep to squeezing a balloon.

We know too that simply practicing assessments will improve students' performance, at least in the short term, but this does not help them with their learning. It's rather like squeezing a child's balloon, the bulge you make when you squeeze it makes the balloon look like it is getting bigger, but there is really no more air in there.  Once you let go, it goes back to the size it was before.  Test practice is a bit like this in that the students aren't learning anything new.  You are just squeezing the balloon.  The way you get more air in the balloon is through more effective instruction.  A key component of this is feedback which keeps teaching and learning on track to achieve its goals.(emphasis is mine)

Why feedback? It is central to ensuring that students have what they need to grow.  Upon continuing this article, I realized that it is narrower in scope than I had originally thought, which is a positive in a two page article.  Higgins suggests that teachers give feedback on the task, the process, and self-regulation.  Providing feedback on the task is fairly common sense; however, feedback on process is something that I need to improve.  It just seems to take so long to do.

One finding from the review is that

letting students know when they get things right, and why they are correct is even more important than pointing out mistakes or errors.

The reasoning behind this seems to be that students need to know what they did well to try to better understand the moves for success so they are likely to do it again.  By pointing out what students do correctly, they are also better prepared to draw conclusions or create patterns and heuristics to know why something is correct.  Internalizing why a thing is or is not correct is where the real learning takes place.

photo courtesy of http://medphoto.wellcome.ac.uk/