Almost all students have experienced it: the teacher of a subject determines a date for the delivery of a work, the student does it, turns it in and, after a while, receives a certain grade along with the corrections. Is that enough for students to learn? Or are there ways to improve the process? Unesco wonders.
Yes, there are, is the response of several studies, one of them from the group Feed2Learnfrom the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), in which it is stated that one of the keys is feedback or return (feedback) between students and teachers, but with some specific characteristics.
Feed2Learn is dedicated to research to support teaching and learning in online environments. His motto is a phrase from Goethe: “Knowing is not enough; We must apply. Wanting is not enough; we must act”.
Rosa M. Mayordomo, professor of Psychology and Educational Sciences at the UOC and member of Feed2Learn, explains that they have started from the assumption that feedback is important for learning, something that teachers and students know. “However, in many cases it doesn’t do its job,” she says.
She co-authored a recent article exploring how Returning online has an emotional and cognitive impact… when it manages to engage students.
Although the teachers invest a lot of time and effort in providing answers to the student, they do not see how to take advantage of it, because they have the feeling that this result only comes at the end of the process, with the grade, when it is time to move on to another unit. What good is it to you? That’s why we decided to study What characteristics should the return have to promote learning? with the aim of designing better strategies”, says Mayordomo.
Giving feedback to the student is not simply correcting mistakes
As the researcher explains, for feedback to be really useful, it must not only correct what each student has done. Its function is help each student to bridge the gap between what he knows at the moment and what he is expected to knowor how he is doing the activity at that moment and how he has to get to do it.
Anna Espasa Roca and Teresa Guasch Pascual developed a brief experiment in 2021 entitled ‘How to involve students so that they use the online feedback?’. They assembled a group of 76 students to receive intervention, which consisted of rework a school project from the feedback of their teachers, before the final delivery. They compared it with the performance of 60 other students who did not have that intervention. “The results show that the reworking of work is associated with higher levels of involvement with the feedbackthey wrote.
For this reason, as a teacher, you not only have to tell the young person how he is at that moment, but you must also provide him with the instruments and resources to help him move towards the educational goal, at the level at which he should be. And for this, he has to tell the boy or girl where to go. How will you get ahead if you don’t know what you and the school expect of them?
And to achieve the latter, it is essential to overcome a great difficulty: the traditional concept that the return is a unidirectional process, from the teacher to the student, the delivery of a grade, and then turning the page. That must stop. It is essential that the dialogue take place between the two, and that it take place during the development of the activity and not only at the end. An example: get the class in the habit of asking them each to turn in a draft of the activity you do, and commit to giving back on this first version.
Educational feedback and emotions linked to achievement
Why was it said that this new model of interaction also impacts the emotionality of students? If you want your group to become more involved in understanding and using the answers, you must consider how they are perceiving the communication with you, the UOC study points out.
“We have focused on the emotions linked to achievementthat is, in which each student experiences when interpreting a result as success or failure, such as hope, optimism, pride, anger, relief, nervousness, hopelessness…” explains Professor Mayordomo.
For now, the study results confirm that when students perceive feedback as positive, or more positive than negative, they experience more emotions such as confidence and hope to improve. And experiencing these emotions is related to greater efforts to use feedback to regulate their learning process, “which can affect in the long term the success expectations of each student and their own perception as a learner,” says the researcher.
Conversely, when students experience negative emotions, such as nervousness or anger, the degree of cognitive involvement with the feedback you give them is lower; they do not expect it, they fear it, their attempts to understand it diminish and they may even ignore it.
“Helping students to become aware of these emotions and to regulate them can promote their involvement with the return. In this regulatory process, the fact that provide answers that are not only corrective, but that help to improve, it can generate in students a greater sense of control over their future results”, points out the researcher.
Being aware of this reality could improve the progression of students, and even help reduce the dropout rate, something that worries Spain, a country in which early school leaving is at 20.2% for men (the highest rate in the European Union) and 11.6% for women.
Learning for teachers and students
When taking these recommendations to face-to-face environments, you have to see the advantages. When there is in-person communication, teachers have plenty of clues as to whether or not each student is understanding feedback. You have to look at non-verbal behaviors and paralinguistic elements of communication; Laughter, crying, silence, gestures and, in the case of online environments, the use of emoticons and reactions are helpful cues.
In both scenarios, the teacher needs to know:
- The way each student interprets the answers.
- How do you feel once you have received them?
- To what extent you understand them if you carry out a subsequent task or activity in which you have to use the feedback.
Of course, this strategy means a higher workload. For this reason, Mayordomo highlights the importance of the entire educational institution sharing a culture of continuous evaluation and feedback, in which dialogue processes between teachers and students, and also between student groups, are facilitated.
The educational center should support teachers by promoting the development of studies based on learning analyticsthat make it possible to collect data to help base evaluation decisions and to know how and when a certain type of return should be provided based on the characteristics of the students.
“It is about putting technology at the service of decision-making, with the aim of promoting increasingly personalized learning”, says the professor. (YO)
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
