Managing the Feedback Loop

Feedback typically comes after learners have been presented with learning events and after they have been given a practice opportunity (eg an opportunity to applying their learning or use concepts learned).

Feedback is one of the most important learning factors because it helps learners overcome several difficulties. In his excellent research report, Dr Will Thalhiemer describes feedback as being beneficial to help learners overcome the following issues:

• Learners didn’t learn the information in the first place.
• Learners learned the information incorrectly.
• Learners forgot the information.
• Learners remembered the information incorrectly.
• Learners incorrectly remembered co-presented information as correct; for example, they remember lures on multiple-choice tests.
• Learners remember a concept in the abstract, but can’t retrieve the information when presented with certain (for example, realistic) cues.

(Thalheimer, W. (2008, May). Providing Learners with Feedback—Part 1: Research-based recommendations for training, education, and e-learning. http://www.work-learning.com/catalog/).

Thalheimer goes on to make some recommendations re providing feedback in a learning context. Here are a selection of his recommendations:

1. Feedback Should Help Learners Develop Appropriate Conceptions: ie it’s not really helpful to tell learners that they are right or wrong, as it is to tell them what the right answer is. The guiding principle should be to give learners the feedback they need. Give them feedback that will help them build appropriate mental models of the concepts to be learned.
2. More Extensive Feedback May be Needed to Build Understanding: When learners are building understanding, they are likely to need more detailed feedback. This won’t be true if the learners are memorising definitions or foreign-language vocabulary, but it will be true if they are learning concepts that are more complicated than simple associations. To help the learners build understanding, it is usually helpful to provide the correct response with a simple explanation of why the response is correct.
3. Immediate versus Delayed Feedback: Which is better, immediate or delayed feedback? To summarise, the research is not clear on this, but it favours delayed feedback. According to Thalheimer, “Delayed feedback produces the same advantages as spaced learning … When learning points are repeated after a delay, learners improve in their ability to remember the information that was repeated.” (Thalheimer, W. (2008, May). Providing Learners with Feedback—Part 1: Research-based recommendations for training, education, and e-learning p.38). So, essentially, giving feedback offers a spaced learning opportunity.
4. Getting Learners to Pay Attention to the Feedback: Feedback completely useless unless learners pay attention to it. So the challenge when designing learning experiences is to present feedback in a way so that learners will pay attention to it and in a manner that supports the learning process.
5. On-the-job Feedback: An important difference to consider re assessment of application of learning to work practice is that on-feedback should generally be delivered soon after the practice event, Behavioural feedback requires some immediacy because it is difficult for those getting the feedback to remember all the contextual cues that guided their behaviour at the time of the incident. For this type of feedback, it’s generally best to provide people feedback that is (a) specific, (b) focused on the behaviour to be corrected, and (d) delivered soon after the incorrect action/decision taken.

There is much more detail and issues to consider in Thalheimer’s publications, but the recommendations above, should help you start to consider how you provide feedback in more detail.



We covered how games designers deal with feedback in Module 2, but it’s worth repeating here (just in case you haven’t read Module 2).

In most formal learning environments, there is usually a delay between learner action (e.g. submitting an assessment) and feedback on that action (e.g. grades and comments on work submitted). This can run anywhere from a few days to a few weeks and crucially it may be beyond the point where the learner can apply it to their next assessment. In this scenario, the feedback becomes a ‘historical’ record rather than being something which can influence future learner activity. In the corporate learning world there is frequently no feedback on individuals’ application of learning in practice at all. Staff go on training courses, learn something new and return to the workplace where it is hoped they will apply their learning – with no further contact with the course facilitator and therefore, no access to expert feedback on their performance. Both these scenarios make it difficult for the learners to gauge the quality of their work and modify their approach to attain improved performance.

By contrast, in game environments, feedback is most often instant and requires the player's immediate action to address that feedback or loops the player back through the experience they’ve just completed to try alternative approaches to completing the task at hand. The challenge for us in learning and development is, how can we move closer to the game design scenario where we can offer timely, useful, applicable feedback to learners at scale and what are the benefits of doing so?

Finally, it’s important to point out that games are effective not because they are games, but because the learning takes place within a meaningful context: i.e. what you learn is directly related to the environment in which you learn and demonstrate it; in other words, the learning is not only relevant to, but applied and practiced within a meaningful context – it directly supports situated cognition (which we’ve discussed previously) and therefore the acquisition and application of theory to practice (Van Eck, 2006, p.4). As Pivec et al point out,

“A number of studies were carried out that focused on retention of learning. Eight out of eleven studies showed that retention is better when using game-based learning”

This doesn’t mean that all of our learning designs have to be games, but it does support the view that we can increase the effectiveness of our learning designs by learning from the game designers and build some of the approaches they have developed into our practice in digital learning design.

Mark Milliron on student feedback:

You should also follow up on the following articles:

• Effective feedback: An indispensable tool for improvement in quality of medical education
• Why is feedback important?
• 9 tips to give and receive eLearning feedback
• A Closer Look at Instructor-Student Feedback Online
• Providing learners with feedback (Parts 1 & 2)