Feedback on Math activities
How do students deal with different experiences of feedback on math activities?
General topic of interest
Feedback: Hattie and Timperley (2007) state that feedback is information provided by an agent (a teacher, a peer, a book, a parent, etc) regarding aspects of one's performance or understanding that can provide corrective information to clarify ideas, provide encouragement, and evaluate the correctness of a response.
Participants
Middle school students.
Data collecting approach
A google form was created to analyze how the students perceive, react and take advantage of different kinds of feedback in Math activities. In order to do so, a photo of the same calculation received six different types of feedback and the students were asked to analyze:
1. How confident they felt to correct the error from the feedback provided.
2. How much they felt that the way of providing feedback helped them to develop their autonomy, that is, helped them to realize their mistake and correct it by themselves.
3. How much they felt that the way the feedback was provided cheered and encouraged them to study.
Data collecting example
Google forms.
Emerging results
The results from the first part of the experiment demonstrates that the type of feedback given by the teacher has an effect on how confident the student get to solve the error. This evidence is more pronounced by the difference in confidence from the “X” feedback to the “Try again”, 22,9% and 37,1% respectively. From the second part of the experiment, the results demonstrates that the students still need to understand the concept of autonomy and the actions that reinforce and stimulate it. This is evident by the result from the feedback when the teacher gives the student the answer, a clear way of not developing students’ autonomy, but is perceived by 57,1% of the students as a way to help developing their autonomy. The last part of the experiment demonstrates that receiving a feedback that is assumed to be a bad one, as te “X” can discourage study. This is evident since this feedback was perceived as a disencouragement by 31,4% of the students and the second more disencouraging type of feedback received only 22,9% of the votes. Of course, a larger number or answers and an statistical analyses are required to confirm that these evidences have statistical significance.
Reflections
It was demonstrated that the school is being effective in creating a culture of constructive feedback, but there is still a need to develop a sense of autonomy in the students.
Next steps
Apply to a larger number of students from the 3 campuses and report the results to my coordinator.
