Research School Network: Everything is Awesome: Feedback We explore the nuances of the EEF toolkit by looking at high impact strands. This time, Mark Miller looks at feedback.

The EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit has a number of strands which we might consider ​‘high impact’, those strands with the highest rating for ​‘additional months progress’. And that means that school leaders are more likely to adopt those practices or approaches. But before we jump on these as the solution to all of our problems, we need to be a little wary, and dig beneath the headlines. That’s why we are looking at some of these strands in an occasional series.

In this series we have previously looked at Metacognition and Homework. This time we focus on feedback.

This seems like an easy question, and the first paragraph of the summary is pretty clear:

But then it gets complicated…

Feedback can be about output or outcome but also about the process. It can be about the individual, or their self-regulation. It can be verbal, written, digital, from a teacher or from a peer. Feedback can take many forms, be given by different people and be about different things. Feedback can be effective during, immediately after and some time after learning.

So, there are many ways to ​‘do’ feedback. Although +6 months on average is pretty good, with such variation are there some approaches that yield more positive results.

Here is what the EEF write in the ​‘behind the average’ section:

• Feedback appears to have slightly greater effects for primary school age pupils (+7 months) than for secondary (+5 months).
• Effects are high across all curriculum subjects, with slightly higher effects in mathematics and science.
• Low attaining pupils tend to benefit more from explicit feedback than high attainers.
• Although some studies have successfully demonstrated the benefits of digital feedback, effects are typically slightly smaller (+ 4 months).

When you break down oral vs written feedback, oral comes out on top. (+7 vs +5)

These nuances are interesting, but there is still not a clear steer of our best approach. Let’s move to the ​‘How could you implement in your setting?’ section.

According to the EEF, implementing feedback successfully will require:

• communicate with pupils, teachers, and parents, about practices and expectations that relate to feedback policies,
• assessing pupil understanding, so that you know what needs to be improved,
• consider the​‘opportunity cost’ associated with different feedback practices,
• ensuring that feedback can be acted upon, for example through including specific information on what a pupil has done successfully or not, assisted with an explanation as to why,
• carefully considering how feedback will be received, including impacts on self-confidence and motivation,
• providing opportunities for pupils to act-upon the feedback after it has been given,
• evaluating how effective the feedback has been.,

All sound advice, but this isn’t going to tell us exactly what we should do. And this is probably why we should also look at the Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning guidance report, which dives even deeper into the evidence.

In his foreword to the guidance report, Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment, Institute of Education, UCL, acknowledges the challenges of the evidence.

Professor Becky Francis, Chief Executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, says in the introduction that we have focussed as a profession too much on the​‘feedback methods see-saw’, the back-and-forth between whether written or verbal feedback is best. She goes on to say: ​‘This guidance report aims to move beyond this ​‘see-saw’ and focus on what really matters: the principles of good feedback rather than the written or verbal methods of feedback delivery.‘

And so we get to one of the main messages from the evidence: stick to certain principles and your feedback will be effective. These are the guiding principles that underpin every message in the guidance:

• lay the foundations for effective feedback;
• deliver appropriately timed feedback, that focuses on moving learning forward;
• plan for how pupils will receive and use feedback

There are no easy answers, but at least there are clear guiding principles which we can use to inform our thinking.

Watch an explainer video about the toolkit and listen to the EEF’s Evidence into Education podcast below.