On Your Marks: Timely Feedback

Back to overview

7 December, 2024 —
Blog

On Your Marks: Timely Feedback

How do we decide on the timeliness of feedback?

Share on:

by Bradford Research School
on the 7th December 2024

Mark Miller

Director, Bradford Research School

“Given the ambiguity in the evidence, the timing of feedback should be left to the careful judgement of the classroom teacher.”

This comes from the EEF’s Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning guidance report. It might feel like a bit of a cop-out, but it reflects the complicated nature of educational evidence and classroom practice:

The review that informs this guidance found that feedback interventions delivered immediately after learning, delivered up to a week after, and delivered during learning are all associated with similarly sized positive effects on attainment.

What can inform ‘the careful judgement of the classroom teacher’? For the timeliness of feedback, we can consider three elements in particular:

The task: Some tasks need immediate feedback e.g. playing an instrument; some can wait.
The pupil: some pupils will benefit from instant formative feedback; for others it could distract or remove the desirable struggle of learning.
The class: sometimes we have to step in and address something; other times we can wait.

Feedback Table 1 — Extract from Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning

Errors

The type of errors students make can affect our responses. Bennett (2011) considers the different ways students can get things wrong:

An error is what we observe students to make – some difference between a desired response and what a student provides. The error we observe may have one of several underlying causes. Among other things, it could be a slip – that is, a careless procedural mistake; or a misconception, some persistent conceptual or procedural confusion (or naive view); or a lack of understanding in the form of a missing bit of conceptual or procedural knowledge, without any persistent misconception. Each of these causes implies a different instructional action, from minimal feedback (for the slip), to reteaching (for the lack of understanding), to the significant investment required to engineer a deeper cognitive shift (for the misconception).

So the particular type of error may dictate the timeliness and nature of our response. Whatever the type, we might ask:

How common are these errors? If lots of students are making the same error, we should address promptly.

How serious are these errors? If there are greater consequences to getting this wrong, then we should address promptly.

When things are both common and serious, we could pause and address immediately. However, the sensible approach might be to wait and take time to prepare the approach to addressing them.

Timely feedback

Let’s have a look at an example of this in practice. Students are writing an essay on an Inspector Calls. In one sense I am delaying the feedback because I will be marking this later. But that doesn’t mean that I’ll ignore any any common issues or individual misconceptions.

I circulate the class and here is the first introduction I see:
In ‘An Inspector Calls’, Priestly depicts society in 192 as communist-ruled, segregated and unfair, using the Birling family as a symbol for the upper-class.

Priestly: With this error. I’m going to say, sternly, “EY.” and I’ll raise my eyebrows. Then I’m going to check other books. If I see it multiple times, I will address it with the whole class, perhaps with a spelling strategy.

192: This one I’m less bothered about. I don’t think this student believes it was set in the year 192. I might just point at the date, reminding them to check their work. And as I move around, there might be a whole class message around checking for these kinds of errors.

Communist-ruled: Now this one I am worried about. And I can see what has happened. They have confused communist with capitalist, probably because we are also studying Animal Farm. And the ‘ruled’ part is also worth addressing. I need to see whether this particular mistake is endemic to the class, or whether it’s just them. And depending what I see elsewhere, it might be worth addressing immediately. However, if my previous explanations haven’t ‘landed’, I might be better to prepare something.

You can see that the nature and timeliness of my response depends on task, pupil and class. But my subject knowledge is important too.

The ‘careful judgement of the classroom teacher’ plays a crucial role in the timeliness of feedback. As it does when we apply evidence to anything.

Bennett, R. E. (2011) ‘Formative assessment: a critical review’, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 18(1), pp. 5 – 25. doi: 10.1080/0969594X.2010.513678.