One of the most significant forces influencing a student's development, achievement and success is feedback on their learning.  However, the power of feedback can be either positive or negative. Hattie and Timperley (2007) proposes a model of feedback which has the greatest positive impact on student learning.  

Hattie and Timperley have defined feedback as "information provided by an agent (e.g. teacher, peer, book, parent, self, experience) regarding aspects of one's performance or understanding.  A teacher or parent can provide corrective information, a peer can provide an alternative strategy a book can provide information to clarify ideas, a parent can provide encouragement and a learner can look up the answer to evaluate the correctness of a response.  Feedback thus is a consequence of performance" 

Quality feedback is  narrowly targeted, clear and connected to learning intentions, success criteria and students' individual learning goals. Sharrat and Fullan (2012) describe quality feedback as being explicit and ideally used by students to self-assess and develop personal learning goals for improvement. Effective feedback outlines for students how they might use the success criteria to accomplish their intended learning goals and gives them practical direct and useful information. It is important to note that feedback by itself may not have the power to initiate further action, but rather a culture of taking on feedback to further develop one own's understanding, skills and knowledge must be fostered to have any impact on learning. 

Feedback should never be confused with praise or positive reinforcement. Hattie and Timperley (2007) note that studies showing the highest effect sizes for feedback involved students receiving information about a task and how to do it more effectively.  Lower effect sizes were related to praise, rewards and punishment. To better understand Hattie's "effect size" please look here for an explanation.  The effect sizes reported in the feedback meta-analyses, however, show considerable variability, indicating that some types of feedback are more powerful than others.  Those studies showing the highest effect sizes involved students receiving information feedback about a task and how to do it more effectively.  Lower effect sizes were related to praise, rewards and punishments. 

There exists an enormous amount of  research regarding feedback on student learning -- in fact a google search produced about 981 000 000 results in less than 0.4 seconds!  However for our purposes we will be concentrating on the paper from Hattie and Timperley, The Power of Feedback which can be accessed in its entirety here. 

To receive your two hours of TQI accreditation, please respond to the questions on this site in an email and send it to bsss.enquiries@act.gov.au in order to be assessed and entered into the TQI Professional Learning Portal. If at any time you have any questions about this course, please reach out to the same email address. 

Dylan Wiliam, Feedback on learning, Education Scotland, 16 Jul 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7Ox5aoZ4ww