Wolfram Rollett (editor) - Student Feedback on Teaching in Schools: Using Student Perceptions for the Development of Teaching and Teachers

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Feedback is a hot topicwith so many studies, and now over 23 meta-analyses on the effect of feedback on achievement (and many more on other outcomes and in other disciplines). Most of this research is premised on feedback from teachers to students, whereas a critical missing link is the measurement, quality, and impact of feedback from students to teachers. This is a well-rehearsed topic in tertiary classes, but far less so in K-12. This book begins to add foundations to the debates about feedback to teachers in elementary, secondary, and high schools.

When I published Visible Learning in 2009, the average effect size from feedback to students was 0.78, and from feedback to teachers was 0.50 (nearly all of the latter studies being from university students). We recently revisited the meta-analyses and located almost every study in the 23 meta-analyses, and recalculated the individual and overall effect: the overall to students has reduced to 0.48 (Wisniewski et al. 2020, also see Chap. ). One major reason is the over hype about feedback, the misplaced emphasis on increasing the quantity of feedback; the ignoring of the massive variability of feedback has led this to decrease. The variability is core to understanding the effectThis was seen in the major synthesis by Kluger and deNisi (1996), who observed that about one-third of feedback is negative, and who were careful to note that the search for these moderators is core. The same feedback may work for me but not you, the same feedback to me today works but not tomorrow. Understanding this variability is the core and this is so often forgotten.

The search for these critical moderators has been underway and gathering pace for many years. There are, from my research on feedback on learning, at least five moderators: Feedback is maximized when there is where to next/improvement focused information in the feedback; when feedback is aligned with the instructional cycle (about the task, process, self-regulation); that praise dilutes the effects (as students focus on and recall the praise over the information); when we overly focus on the giving compared to the reception of feedback; and, most critically, the effect on students is higher when teachers demonstrate they are willing to receive feedback about their impact.

Like students, teachers need to hear, understand, and action the feedback they receive. Some teachers are impervious to feedback, thinking that their task is to give feedback to students, not receive it themselves; some use the many cognitive biases which make us humans to reinterpret student feedback (such as confirmation bias, where good feedback is about me and negative feedback is about the students); some are extremely good at selectively listening to student feedback; some dismiss student feedback as ill-informed and the whims of youngsters; and some collect the feedback too late, so it has little impact on improving the teaching for the students. In my own case as a University Professor, I have read student evaluations of my teaching for many decades and if they do not say He speaks too fast, then I question the validity of the other student responses. But the proper question should be: Why have I not improved my speaking skills? Such confirmation bias, dismissing of the value of student responses, and seeing evaluations as more worthwhile for promotion than improvement, means that I and my students are the losers.

It does seem ironic that teachers will listen to feedback from external adult observers who come into their classes and conduct fleeting observations of their teaching. This feedback from observers is more often about how they teach, and usually not about the impact of their teaching on the students. There is a corpus of research, noted in many chapters, of the major issues with the reliability of these external observations. But there is already a plethora of studies showing the high reliabilities of student feedback to teachers, which is then often dismissedStudents could not possibly have worthwhile information, are biased (as they do not know good teaching!), and they are recipients not informers of teaching. Why do we (a) see unreliability as a major question for observational methods, but (b) when student feedback has been shown to meet these reliability criterions, we change the blame to other factors? This book reviews the evidence on how to maximize the reliability and validity of student feedback, outlines many of the more dependable measures, and invites deeper discussion on the informational value which can be derived from students feedback to teachers.