Should Feedback Include Improvement Strategies?

Supporting students in closing the gap between current performance and a goal state is at the heart of formative assessment. It would seem common sense then that part of the teacher’s role in the assessment process would include suggesting strategies students can use to close that gap.

Researchers from the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands set out to find out whether that is in fact an effective approach.

As part of the research, 82 students received feedback on the first draft of a writing assignment using a structured feedback form. Around half of these students received feedback that included suggested improvement strategies, and the other half received only the feedback without improvement strategies.

Each of these two conditions was further divided. Half of the participants in each condition were given reflection questions, asking them to consider how they might use the feedback when writing their final draft. The other half in each respective condition were asked to reflect only on their opinions regarding the feedback they received.

Thus there were four experimental conditions in all—improvement strategies with reflection on intentions, improvement strategies with opinion only, feedback only with reflection on intentions, and feedback only with opinion only. Eleven of the participants (two or three in each experimental condition) were interviewed to gain a more in-depth understanding of the effects of the various conditions.

What were the results of the study?

• No main effect was found for either of the interventions (the provision of improvement strategies, and structured reflection on intentions regarding feedback use).

• Significant interaction effects between the two interventions were found, however. Students who received suggested strategies showed improvement between first and final draft when they were not asked to reflect on how they would use the feedback, whereas students who did not receive improvement strategies showed improvement when they were asked to reflect on how they might use the feedback.

• There was no effect of improvement strategies on students’ goal orientations. (The researchers had expected that the provision of improvement strategies would focus students on the learning, and may therefore cause students to develop goals more oriented towards mastery than performance or grades.)

• When many improvement strategies were suggested, this impacted negatively on students’ self-efficacy beliefs. This was especially the case for students whose self-efficacy beliefs were low or moderate prior to receiving feedback.

• The interview data suggested that students often felt the suggested strategies either underestimated their capabilities or did not match with their own writing habits. Sometimes they were already aware of the strategies that were suggested to them, but had not made use of them. Students took the suggestions as indications that there was a problem, but often ignored them and went about solving the problem in their own way.

What might this mean for our classrooms?

Researchers had expected both of the experimental interventions to have a positive impact on student performance, and while it seems that each intervention individually may have had some beneficial impacts, it is important to address the question of why, in combination, the two appeared to cancel each other out.

Researchers believe that for those students who felt the suggested strategies were useful, the reflection may have interfered with the writing process already set in train by the teacher’s suggestions. For those students who felt the strategies were not useful, the interview data suggest that the rejection of the strategy had already triggered a reflection/problem-solving process and so the added reflection may have been superfluous and possibly even harmful.

The question of why the improvement strategies did not seem to focus students on the learning, and thus shift their focus toward mastery goals, also merits some consideration. The researchers believe that the answer may lie at least partially in the way that the improvement strategies seem to have been perceived by students.

Since students often perceived the suggestions to be an underestimation of their capabilities rather than information that might help them towards higher performance, it seems the strategies may not have served the function of focusing the students on learning.

So where does that leave us? Is it helpful to suggest improvement strategies as part of the feedback we give students or not? The researchers argue that the problem may lie not with the idea of providing improvement strategies per se, but rather with the need to match particular strategies with the capacities and the prior repertoire of individual students.

They believe that strategies should be negotiated in conversation with each student. As part of a conversation, it is possible to discuss the strategies a student is already using, consider how appropriate these are in a given situation and suggest alternatives the student is not aware of.

Conversations also provide a potential venue for demonstrating how a strategy works. Negotiating and fine-tuning approaches together in these ways makes it less likely that students will perceive suggestions as an underestimation of their capabilities.

In situations where teachers do not provide strategies, a reflection assignment that obliges students to consider how they will make use of the feedback they have received seems helpful in improving performance.

Reference

Duijnhouwer, H., Prins, F. & Stokking, K. (2012) “Feedback providing improvement strategies and reflection on feedback use: Effects on students’ writing motivation, process and performance. Learning and Instruction, 22, pp. 171-184.

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