Instant Feedback

At the center of the educational spotlight this week: instant feedback. It is now a technological given. Gone are the days of waiting for your teacher to grade your test and wait for it to be handed back. Now, we have the tools to create our tests electronically, and results from any of these assessments, be they formative, summative, diagnostic, norm-referenced, criterion referenced, can be delivered instantaneously.

For animals and small children, the proximity of feedback on a given behavior is key. The more time that passes between a behavior and the feedback, the less likely the subject is to connect any sort of cause and effect relationship. This relationship is at the heart of behavioral science and works with behaviors you want to cultivate and those you would like to extinguish. 

But, not all learning involves learning a behavior; some things we grasp or not based on developmental readiness and this type of readiness, as we well know, varies from learner to learner. Sometimes, students internalize the lesson, other times, it simply goes over their heads. Eventually, when they're ready to notice, they will. In these cases, is there a benefit to immediate feedback or is there a downside to the constant and instant judgment about how one measures up to an ideal? Are our students equipped to deal with the feedback constructively and do they really use it as a springboard to learning more or better or, as I often see, do they wear their numeric score or grade as a badge, an external indicator of worth in the class hierarchy? Despite my admonishments, every time my students get results, the first thing I see them do is turn to someone else to compare scores. In middle school, maybe the constant assessment just adds to the pressure that adolescence naturally brings. Of course, we have to teach students how to use the potentially valuable information that can be gained from seeing immediate results, but because some things only start to make sense with maturity and perspective, does a scored assessment always add value?

The other questions begged in our search of faster and better assessments are can we and should we assess everything? As teachers, we are hearing more and more that nothing worth doing in the classroom should go without assessment and, if you don’t assess it, don’t waste your time teaching it. Unfortunately, I didn’t get into teaching English because of my need to parse data or reduce learning to a number. There is a need for feedback, certainly, not only to assess student learning and progress but also to evaluate our own teaching. But, with the limited amount of time I have with students, I prefer to maximize the time spent in discussion and practice, rather than fill it with assessments that serve the sometimes false goal, and mainly administrative purpose, of accountability in teaching.


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As always, I would be remiss if I did not direct you to the musings of my better blogging two thirds.

Ms Karen Lovett

Ms Julie Forbes