Research School Network: Building a feedback culture: working memory Feedback only works if pupils can process it.

Working memory is where information is actively processed, but it has limited capacity. If feedback overloads working memory, pupils may struggle to make use of it.

In this blog, we’ll look at three ways working memory can become a barrier to effective feedback – and what we can do about them.

Verbal feedback is transient

Verbal feedback has many advantages – it’s quick, immediate, saves time – but its biggest disadvantage is that it disappears.

Because working memory is limited in both capacity and duration, pupils can only hold and process a limited amount of information, and only for a short period before needing to rehearse or refresh. The longer pupils have to hold feedback in mind before acting on it, the more likely it is that some of it will be lost.

Therefore, we need to give pupils the opportunity to act on our verbal feedback. Sometimes this is straightforward. A pupil writes a response on a mini-whiteboard. You notice they have left out a capital letter. You remind them, ​“Don’t forget your capital letter,” and they immediately make the correction. There is no need for them to remember the feedback because they can act on it straight away.

When pupils can’t act immediately, we can reduce the demands on working memory by offloading some of that information into the environment. Instead of expecting pupils to remember everything they have been told, we provide simple prompts or reminders that they can refer back to.

This might involve leaving a model answer on the board while pupils improve their own work, providing a simple checklist for pupils to refer to as they redraft, or highlighting the specific sentence or paragraph that needs improving rather than expecting pupils to remember where the issue was. In each case, pupils spend less effort remembering the feedback and more effort improving their work.

Written feedback can become overwhelming

Unlike verbal feedback, written feedback doesn’t disappear.

As an English teacher, I used to feel that I should comment on everything. Not a single spelling mistake was ignored (Shakespear, similie, buisness, solider etc). I dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s and I crossed the large circles pupil drew instead of the dots over the i’s too. There was maybe also a sense that if I wasn’t writing lots of comments, it might look as though I hadn’t marked the work properly. Notwithstanding any negative impact on motivation, there’s a fair chance that lots of this feedback never led to improvement because there was simply too much to process.

Feedback should move the learner forward. It can’t do that if there is so much of it that it becomes overwhelming. So simplifying our feedback and choosing a clear focus gives pupils a much better chance of acting on it.

Unfamiliar feedback processes create unnecessary cognitive demands

Below is an example of whole class feedback for an English Literature essay on A Christmas Carol.

At first, this feedback sheet looks cognitively demanding. Pupils have to understand the format, know where to find their task and know how to respond. All of this before we even get to the complexity of the feedback itself.

But these demands reduce with repetition. Once the format becomes familiar, pupils no longer spend cognitive resources navigating the process. They can devote it to acting on the feedback.

As Peps McCrea puts it:

​“Routines strip out redundant decision costs, reduce the amount of novel information that we have to process, and make the most of our ability to think less about the things we repeatedly do.”

This is one of the reasons I’m such a fan of consistent mini-whiteboard routines. Everyone knows the drill, so we can all focus on making the feedback stick.

Across the last few blogs we’ve looked at trust,self-efficacy, motivation and now working memory. They interact in different ways. For a great example of a powerful feedback culture, check out our latest Clip from the Classroom, filmed at Dixons Trinity Chapeltown in Leeds.