The Hattie and Timperley Model

The flowchart below presents a framework from Hattie and Timperley (2007) in which feedback can be considered. The main purpose of feedback is to reduce the discrepancies between current understandings and performance and a goal.  Effective feedback must answer three major questions:

1. Where am I going?  What are my goals?

2. How am I going?  What progress is being made toward the goal?

3. Where to next?  What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?

These questions correspond to jargon of 'feed up', 'feedback' and 'feed forward'. 

An ideal learning environment or experience occurs when both teachers and students seek answers to each of these questions. 

Where am I going?  What are my goals?

Goals for students are often linked to learning intention and success criteria.  Goals need to be clear and concise within the task and the rubric or marking scheme. Feedback on student performance in relation to these goals must be related to achieving success on critical dimensions of the goal. For example, students are given feedback on presentation, spelling and word count in writing when the criteria for success require, say, "creating mood in a story". Such feedback is not effective in reducing the gap relating to the intention of creating mood (Clark, Timperley & Hattie, 2003; Timperley & Parr, 2005). This means when setting assessment  a clear criteria for assessment is required to guide assessment and that the task does not engage with skills and knowledge irrelevant to the curriculum being delivered, e.g. movie making skills in Biology class. 

How am I going? What progress is being made toward the goal?

Feedback is effective when it consists of information about progress, and/or about how to proceed to correct any misunderstandings.  Answering these questions involve a teacher providing information relative to as task or performance goal,  often in relation to some expected standard, to prior performance and/or to success or failure in relation to some specific part of the task.  Answering these questions are powerful and informative not just for the student but also for the teacher. Teachers should where possible respond to what they learn from student work in their teaching, but there remains a significant portion whose responsibility lies with the learner. (see below)

  Where to next?  What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?

The power of feedback can be used to specifically address this question by providing information that leads to greater possibilities for learning. These may include:

• enhanced challenges

• more self-regulation over the learning process 

• greater fluency and automaticity'

• more strategies and process to work work on the tasks

• deeper understanding

• more information about what is and what is not understood

This feed forward question can have some of the most powerful impacts on learning

How Feedback Works: Reducing the discrepancy between current and desired understanding.

 Student focused approaches:

There are many possible ways for students to close the gap between current and desired understanding, skills and knowledge in response to feedback. 

Those approaches likely to improve learning outcomes include:

• Increased student effort

• Student engaging with more challenging tasks and appreciating higher quality experiences rather than just more work aimed at the remember/understand level of Bloom's but extending into the analyse, evaluate or create levels of Bloom's Taxonomy

• Intended student goal "is clear, when high commitment is secured for it, and when belief in eventual success is high" (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996)

• Student develops effective error detection skills, which leads to their own self-feedback aimed at reaching a goal--this error detection is most powerful provided students have a workable amount of knowledge and understanding about the task in order to strategise and regulate their learning. 

• Students possess the ability to seek better strategies to complete the task or they can obtain information from which they can then solve problems or use their self-regulatory skills. 

However some feedback strategies are much less effective in reducing the gap between current and desired understanding, skills and knowledge in response to feedback.

Those approaches unlikely to be effective include:

• Blurring the learning goals

• Making goals too big by combining them with other learning goals--this allows students to pick and choose their goals

•  Student reducing the challenge of goals or accepting performance far below their capabilities as satisfactory. 

 Teacher focused approaches:

There are also multiple ways teachers can assist in closing the gap between actual performance and desired goal attainment.  These approaches include:

• Providing appropriately challenging, clear and specific goals. Specific goals are much more effective than general ones as a tool for focusing students' attention, which also allows for more directed feedback (Locke & Latham, 1984).  Specific goals and associated feedback are also more likely to include information about criteria for success in attaining such goals. 

• Creating a learning environment which develops student self-regulation and error detection skills

We will now explore the four levels at which feedback and the three questions (Where am I going? How am I going? Where to next?) can be addressed.

 Task Level

Feedback at this level includes information about how well a task is accomplished or performed, such as distinguishing correct from incorrect answers or acquiring more or different information. This type of feedback is most frequent and is often referred to as corrective feedback or knowledge of results.  Teachers commonly mix corrective feedback with feedback at the self level which dilutes the power of the task feedback.  (An example of this mix of corrective and self feedback is "Good boy, that is correct") By itself, corrective feedback can be powerful-- as Hattie has stated "correct information is a pedestal on which the processing and self-regulation is effectively built".  

Task feedback used to address faulty interpretations,  rather than lack of information. The main reason task level feedback is not as effective as process level or self-regulation level is that is often does not generalise to other tasks. Improvement will be specific to the questions for which feedback was provided and cannot be used to answer other questions. 

 Process Level

Feedback about the processing of the task is more specific to the systems or techniques student engaged with which can assist with fundamental tasks or related and extending tasks.  An import type of process level feedback  relates to students' strategies for error detection, thus providing self-feedback. Whether students engage in error correction strategies following the detection depends on their engagement with their learning goals. Feedback at the process level appears to be more effective than at the task level for enhancing deeper learning. Earley et al (1990) claimed that "using process feedback with goal setting appears to be a direct and powerful way of shaping an individual's task strategy and using outcome feedback is a much less efficient way of shaping strategy. (p. 103)

 Self-Regulation Level

The interaction between commitment, control, and confidence is a key component of self-regulation. It talks about how students control, guide, and lead their behaviours towards the learning objective. It suggests independence, restraint, self-direction, and self-discipline.  Self-management is the monitoring and regulating of students' ongoing behaviour through planning, correcting mistakes and using fix-up strategies. As students become more effective at self-assessment, multiple dimensions of performance can be assessed (Paris & Cunningham, 1996). Most important, students know how and when to seek and receive feedback from others and have effective strategies to implement it.  Self-regulatory feedback 

Self Level

Personal feedback such as "good girl" or "great effort", typically expresses positive (and sometimes negative) evaluations and feelings about the student. It usually contains little task related information and is rarely converted into more engagement, commitment to learning goals, enhanced self-efficacy or understanding about the task. Self level feedback can only have an impact on learning if it leads to changes in student's efforts, engagement, or feelings of of efficacy in relation to the learning or to the strategies they use when attempting to understand tasks.  The information has too little value to result in learning gains.  However it is important to make the distinction that although praise like "good effort" is uninformative to the student, however praise such as, "you're really great because you have diligently completed this task by applying this concept" is informative with regard to what the student did well and in building self-efficacy and hence the effects are much greater.