We should never give verbal feedback to learners in 16 to 19 education. There is no evidence that it makes a difference. Feedback should instead be written or delivered through digital tools.
Before you rip up your feedback policy, I should point out that I’ve made a bit of a leap there.
The EEF’s new Developing Independent Learners summarises promising approaches for post-16 settings. It’s another useful resource, and a feature I love is the ‘evidence gaps’ section. So for feedback:
Evidence gaps
16–19 relevant studies used either digital tools or written teacher comments to provide feedback. Although none of the studies featured verbal feedback, this does not mean verbal feedback is ineffective. Research in this phase also mainly focuses on individual feedback, with less focus on group or whole-class approaches. Overall, these gaps highlight a need for further research to better understand which feedback approaches are most effective in 16–19 settings.
So there are no relevant studies featuring verbal feedback, but this is quite different to saying that verbal feedback doesn’t make a difference. I withdraw my earlier statement.
Evidence gaps
I know that we look to research for a degree of certainty, but it’s also important to highlight where we are less certain, or where we don’t have available evidence.
One place where this is done well is the EEF’s Cognitive science approaches in the classroom: a review of the evidence. Cognitive science is one area where we have lots of gaps. In particular, we have relatively few studies that look at the impact of some popular approaches under typical classroom conditions.
The evidence for the application of cognitive science principles in everyday classroom conditions (applied cognitive science) is limited, with uncertainties and gaps about the applicability of specific principles across subjects and age ranges.
Let’s look at the example of interleaving, a concept that has become a little more common in curriculum design over the last decade. First we are told that it may be an effective strategy for solving mathematical problems for pupils in the range of 8 – 14. But… ‘there is little or no applied evidence of interleaving being applied to topics outside of mathematics or for younger or older pupils.’
Ok, maybe we just shouldn’t be doing this in other subjects? Or we could ask what it is about interleaving in maths that might make it effective? And does that have any implication for my context? We arrive at this tentative statement:
It is possible that the more similar interleaved items are, the harder pupils must think to differentiate between them, increasing the level of challenge. As pupils become more able to discern the differences of tasks and select appropriate strategies, it may be appropriate to interleave more similar problems as this should require more nuanced discrimination.
So there is a wide evidence gap, but the evidence we do have points to a plausible explanation for why the approach might work. And perhaps this gives us one way to deal with some of these gaps. We acknowledge what we don’t know, look carefully at what we do know, and ask how far that evidence can reasonably inform decisions in our own context.
The gaps are the evidence
We might see evidence gaps simply as a lack of information: things we don’t know and therefore don’t need to spend much time talking about. But I don’t think they are vacuums. Knowing where the evidence stops tells us something important about the evidence itself.
If the majority of studies into handwriting interventions take place in primary schools, that evidence can still inform a secondary intervention. We may be less confident that the findings will transfer to a different age group, and need to think carefully about what we retain from the studied approach and what we adapt. But we don’t need to ignore the evidence.
This is why I value curators of evidence that are explicit about these limitations.
The Great Teaching Toolkit Evidence Review from Evidence Base Education remains an excellent resource to understand the evidence that we have around effective teaching. It’s far more credible for me precisely because they acknowledge the complexity and the gaps in the evidence.
Instead of a clear, comprehensive and reliable model of great teaching, research gives us partial insights, often contradictory or confusing, much of it based on weak correlations between ill-defined teacher behaviours and rather impoverished measures of student learning that may reflect confounds as much as genuine causal relationships
Despite this acknowledgement, the review navigates the uncertainty, drawing together what we do know, and being clear about what we don’t.
Gaps, limitations, nuances, hedges, flaws, caveats, exceptions, ambiguities, unanswered questions. They are all valuable – let’s always try to be open about them.
