Errors and feedback > Emulating teacher feedback

Question 7
How can feedback that is dynamically tailored to the student’s level of mathematical expertise help a student use feedback on mathematical tasks effectively?

Feedback could be tailored to the student in different ways, such as by taking into account the student’s history on performance of similar tasks or performance in a task sequence prior to the current task in this sequence.

What motivates this question?

Feedback on e-assessment tasks is often based on the knowledge of the task designer about alternative conceptions of students regarding the task and about common mistakes made by students during execution of a solution method. Moreover, feedback is often designed in a one-size-fits-all form and does not take into account the student’s level of mathematical expertise. For instance, the STACK e-assessment system is “stateless”, meaning that grading of student responses cannot depend on any prior knowledge about the student, though development of a “stateful” version is underway (Harjula et al., 2017).

Cognitive load theorists have identified the expertise reversal effect in instructional guidance, meaning that the relative effectiveness of different instructional methods may reverse as levels of task-specific expertise increase (Kalyuga et al., 2003; Kalyuaga, 2015). Feedback in formative assessment is a form of instructional guidance and so we may expect to see the same effect here.

What might an answer look like?

Experimental work could compare the use of generic feedback with feedback that is tailored based on students’ previous performance. This could perhaps be guided by existing experimental work on the expertise reversal effect.

The content of feedback is considered in various questions, including:

References

Harjula, M., Malinen, J., & Rasila, A. (2017). STACK with state. MSOR Connections, 15(2), 60–69. Retrieved from https://journals.gre.ac.uk/index.php/msor/article/view/408

Kalyuga, S. (2015). Instructional Guidance. Charlottte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Kalyuga, S., Ayres, P., Chandler, P., & Sweller, J. (2003). The Expertise Reversal Effect. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 23–31. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326985EP3801_4