Principle #5: Goal-directed practice coupled with targeted feedback are critical to learning
Practice and feedback are essential for learning. Within the context of a learning environment, practice is understood as any activity in which students engage their knowledge or skills, while feedback is understood as information provided to students about their performance on a task that is intended to guide future behaviour.
The Importance of Practice
To advance student learning, research suggests that practice should focus on a specific goal or criterion, target an appropriate level of challenge, and be of sufficient frequency.
The Importance of Feedback
The purpose of feedback is to help learners achieve a desired level of performance. Just like how a map provides key information about a traveler’s current position to help him or her find an efficient route to a destination, effective feedback provides information about a learner’s current state of knowledge and performance that can guide them in working toward the learning goal. Effective feedback should communicate to students where they are relative to the intended learning goals, what they need to do to improve, and should be communicated to students when they can make the most use of it and improve their future performance.
What makes Feedback Effective?
Not all feedback is necessarily helpful to students, and there is an important difference between formative and summative feedback. Formative feedback provides information that helps students progress towards meeting the intended learning goals of an assignment. Summative feedback gives students a final judgment or evaluation of proficiency, such as grades or scores.
Consider, for example, a GPS system. It has the capability of tracking a traveler’s current position relative to a destination. To be helpful, a GPS needs to communicate more than the fact that the traveler is far away from the destination. Ideally, it will identify how far the traveler is from the destination and provide directions to help the traveler reach it. Similarly, effective feedback needs to do more than simply tell a student that he or she is wrong. Effective feedback involves giving students a clear picture of how their current knowledge or performance differs from the learning goals and providing information on adjustments that can be made to help students reach that goal.
The timing of feedback is also important. Continuing with our GPS example, a GPS system will give feedback to a driver when the driver needs it. Ideally, this will be multiple times before they reach their final destination. So too, with students. Typically, the earlier and more often that feedback can be provided to students, the better. More frequent feedback generally leads to more efficient learning because it helps students stay on track and address their errors before they become entrenched (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).
Strategies
The following strategies can help you implement effective practice opportunities for students in your course and provide efficient and effective feedback opportunities.
- Conduct a prior knowledge assessment to target an appropriate challenge level. This can help you, as an instructor, get a sense of students’ strengths and weaknesses.
- Be more explicit about your goals for the course. This way, students don’t have to assume things
- Use a rubric to specify and communicate performance criteria
- Build in multiple opportunities for practice
- Give examples or models of target performance
- Look for patterns of errors in student work, and communicate your findings to the whole class
- Prioritize feedback, focusing on key aspects of assignments or one dimension at a time
- Balance strengths and weaknesses in feedback. This can help students keep track of their progress
- Incorporate peer feedback