Topic Progress:

UNPACKING STRATEGY 3

Effective Feedback

Read the following excerpt from John Hattie’s article, Feedback in Schools (Hattie, 2011).

Effective feedback helps students answer these questions:

Where Am I going? The first question relates to goals. When students understand their goals and what success of those goals look like, then the feedback is more powerful. Without them feedback is often confusing, disorienting, and interpreted as something about the student not their tasks or work. There are two major elements of goals, these are challenge and commitment. Challenging goals relate to feedback in two major ways. First, they inform individuals “as to what type or level of performance is to be attained so that they can direct and evaluate their actions and efforts accordingly. Feedback allows them to set reasonable goals and to track their performance in relation to their goals so that adjustments in effort, direction, and even strategy can be made as needed” (Locke & Latham, 1990, p. 23). These levels of attainment can be termed success criteria. Goal commitment, which refers to one’s attachment or determination to reach a goal, has a direct and often secondary impact on goal performance. There are many mediators that can affect goal commitment and among the more important are peers, who can influence goal commitment through pressure, modeling, and competition, and particularly during adolescence the reputation desired by the student can very much affect the power of this peer influence (Carroll, Houghton, Durkin, & Hattie, 2009).

How am I going? The second question is more related to progress feedback (How Am I Going?). This entails feedback (about past, present or how to progress) relative to the starting or finishing point and is often expressed in relation to some expected standard, to prior performance, and/or to success or failure on a specific part of the task. Feedback information about progress, about personal best performance, and comparative effects to other students can be most salient to this second question.

Where to next? The third question is more consequential, Where to next? Such feedback can assist in choosing the next most appropriate challenges, more self-regulation over the learning process, greater fluency and automaticity, different strategies and processes to work on the tasks, deeper understanding, and more information about what is and what is not understood.


Keys to Effective Feedback

link Read more about the Wiggins’ 7 Keys to Effective Feedback here.

Word Use this worksheet to note some examples of feedback you have given students that fall in each of the 7 keys.


Amount of Feedback

There is such a thing as too much feedback. Adapted from: Brookhart, S. M. (2008).