FEEDBACK1
“In years of looking at schools and jobs, I have almost never seen an ideal [feedback] system.
Managers, teachers, employees, and students seldom have adequate information about how well
they are performing.”2
Introduction: Why much of the discussion of “formative” assessment is confused
Who could argue with the idea that formative assessment is a good thing? Both common
sense and the research make clear that more feedback and opportunities to use it enhances
performance and achievement [(See Pollock (2012), Hattie (2008) and Marzano, Pickering
& Pollock (2001)]; I argued this point thoroughly 14 years ago (Wiggins 1998).
Yet, even Hattie acknowledges that in spite of the fact that his research long ago clearly
revealed that “feedback was among the most powerful influences on achievement [Hattie
(2008), p. 173] he has “struggled to understand the concept ever since.” Some of the
confusion, I think, is found in the fact that the view of feedback he proposes blurs
important distinctions between feedback and advice. This blurring can be found in many
current writings on feedback (See, for example Harvard Business Press (2006)]. Oddly
enough, in some writings on the subject [e.g. Clarke (2001)] there isn’t even an attempt to
define the term.
So, let’s look more closely at just what feedback is and isn’t. To do so will make it more
likely that we use and invent far better formative assessment practices.
1 To be published in the September 2012 issue of
Educational Leadership. Please do not disseminate without
permission.
2 Human Competence, Thomas Gilbert (1978), p. 178
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FEEDBACK
What is feedback?
Feedback is goal-related information about how we are doing or what we just did. We hit
the tennis ball and see where it lands: in or out. We tell a joke and hear (as well as witness)
audience reaction – they laugh or they don’t. We use the word processor, and the spellchecker underlines misspellings. We teach a lesson and we see that some students have
their eyes riveted on us while others are nodding off. And did you notice that in all the
examples no person offered verbal feedback? There was only a tangible result of actions
taken.
All of these examples involve the “feeding back” of information while trying to reach a goal
(hit the ball in, cause laughter, spell accurately, teach so that they are engaged and
learning). Wikipedia defines it technically this way: “Feedback is information about actions
returned to the source of the actions” – a definition that properly reflects the original
science/systems meaning of the term (e.g. the squealing sound in loudspeakers), as well as
the interpersonal meaning of the term.
Alas, though the word is thus properly used to describe information about what happens in
performance in relation to a goal, it is unfortunately more often used to describe all kinds
of comments made after the fact, including advice, praise, and evaluation – none of which is
feedback, strictly speaking, and none of which is needed in a robust feedback system, as
video games and learning to walk as a baby make clear.
Here are some other examples of feedback.

A friend says: “You know, when you put it that way and speak in that softer tone of
voice, it makes me feel better.”
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
A baseball coach says: “Each time you swung and missed, you pulled your head out
as you swung (and so didn’t really have your ‘eye on the ball’). The one you hit hard,
you kept your head still and saw the ball.”

A teacher comments on a student’s short story that “the first few paragraphs kept
my full attention: the scene painted was vivid and interesting. But then the dialogue
was hard to follow as a reader: I was confused as to who was talking, and the
sequence of actions was puzzling, so I became less engaged.”
Note that these examples, unlike the first three examples, involve human givers of
feedback. In the first group, the performers simply had to take note of the effect of their
actions, mindful of the point of their actions. In the 2nd group, however, all the examples
involved deliberate and explicit giving of feedback by other people. (Whether it was right
or wrong information is not the point; correct or not, it should be called feedback).
Comments about the effects of my actions were “fed back” to me to better help me grasp
what happened in light of my goals. Implied is that the feedback giver saw something that I
may have missed – information I can thus use to improve should I so wish.
Regardless of the source of the feedback, the key point is that I received an account of what
happened, not advice or evaluation. No one told me what to do differently or how “good” or
“bad” my results were. You may think, perhaps that the reader of my writing in the v3rd
comment was evaluating my work, but look at the words used again: she is simply playing
back the effect of my writing on her: here’s where it was hard to follow as a reader. Strictly
speaking, then, feedback is information about the effects of my goal-related actions,
whether from people or observable consequences.
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The 7 key characteristics of helpful feedback
Whether or not the feedback is just “there” to be grasped or offered by another person, all
the examples highlight seven key characteristics of helpful feedback.
Helpful feedback is –
1. Goal-referenced
2. Transparent
3. Actionable
4. User-friendly
5. Timely
6. Ongoing
7. Consistent
Though some of these traits have been noted by various researchers [for example,
Marzano, Pickering & Pollock (2001) identify some of #3, #5, #1 and #4 in describing
feedback as corrective, timely, specific to a criterion], it is only when we clearly distinguish
the two meanings of “corrective” (i.e. feedback vs. advice) and use all seven that we get the
most robust improvements and sort out Hattie’s puzzle as to why some “feedback” works
and other “feedback” doesn’t. Let’s look at each criterion in turn.
1. Goal-referenced. There is only feedback if a person has a goal, takes actions to achieve the
goal, and gets goal-related information fed back. To talk of feedback, in other words, is to
refer to some notable consequence of one’s actions, in light of an intent. I told a joke – why?
To make people laugh; I wrote the story – why? To paint vivid pictures and capture
revealing feelings and dialogue for the reader to feel and see; I went up to bat – why? To get
a hit. Any and all feedback refers to a purpose I am presumed to have. (Alas, too often, I am
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not clear on or attentive to my own goals – and I accordingly often get feedback on that
disconnect.)
Given a desired outcome, feedback is what tells me if I should continue on or change
course. If some joke or aspect of the writing isn’t working – a revealing, non-judgmental
phrase – I need to know.
To that end, a former colleague of mine when I was a young
teacher asked students every Friday to fill out a big index card with “what worked for you
and didn’t work for you this week.” I once heard an exasperated NFL coach say in a postgame interview on the radio: “What do you think we do out here, wind a playbook up and
pray all season? Coaching is about quick and effective adjustment in light of results!”
Note that goals (and the criteria for them) are often implicit in everyday situations. I don’t
typically announce when telling the joke that my aim is to make you laugh or that I wrote
that short story as an exercise in irony. In adult professional and personal life, alas, goals
and criteria for which we are accountable are sometimes unstated or unclear as well –
leading to needlessly sub-par performance and confusing feedback. It can be extra
challenging for students: many teachers do not routinely make the long-term goals of
lessons and activities sufficiently clear. Better student achievement may thus depend not
on more “teaching” or feedback only but constant reminders by teachers of the goal against
which feedback is given: e.g. “Guys, the point here is to show, not tell in your writing: make
the characters come alive in great detail! That’s the key thing we’ll be looking for in peer
review and my feedback to you.” (That’s arguably the value of rubrics, but far too many
rubrics are too vague to be of help.)
2. Transparent and tangible, value-neutral information about what happened. Therefore, any
useful feedback system involves not only a clear goal, but transparent and tangible results
related to the goal. Feedback to students (and teachers!) needs to be as concrete and
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obvious as the laughter or its absence is to the comedian and the hit or miss is to the Little
League batter. If your goal as a teacher is to “engage” learners as a teacher, then you must
look for the most obvious signs of attention or inattention; if your goal as a student is to
figure out the conditions under which plants best grow, then you must look closely at the
results of a controlled experiment. We need to know the tangible consequences of our
attempts, in the most concrete detail possible – goal-related facts from which we can learn.
That’s why samples or models of work are so useful to both students and teachers – more
so than the (somewhat abstract) rubrics by themselves.
Even as little pre-school children, we learn from such results and models without adult
intervention. That’s how we learned to walk; that’s how we finally learned to hold a spoon
effectively; that’s how we learned that certain words magically yield food, drink, or a
change of clothes from big people. Thus, the best feedback is so tangible that anyone who
has a goal can learn from it. Video games are the purest example of such tangible feedback
systems: for every action we take there is a tangible effect. We use that information to
either stay on the same course or adjust course. The more information “fed back” to us, the
more we can self-regulate, and self-adjust as needed. No “teaching” and no “advice” – just
feedback! That’s what the best concrete feedback does: it permits optimal self-regulation in
a system with clear goals.
Far too much educational feedback is opaque, alas, as revealed in a true story told to me
years ago by a young teacher. A student came up to her at year’s end and said, “Miss Jones,
you kept writing this same word on my English papers all year, and I still don’t know what
it means.” “What’s the word?” she asked. “Vag-oo,” he said. (The word was “vague”!). Sad to
say, too much teacher feedback is ‘vagoo’ – think of the English teacher code written in
margins (AWK, Sent. Frag, etc.) Rarely does the student get information as tangible about
how they are currently doing in light of a future goal as they get in video games. The
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notable exceptions: art, music, athletics, mock trial – in short, areas outside of core
academics!
This transparency of feedback becomes notably paradoxical under a key circumstance:
when the information is available to be obtained, but the performers do not obtain it –
either because they don’t look for it or because they are too busy performing to see it. We
have all seen how new teachers are sometimes so busy concentrating on “teaching” that
they fail to notice that few students are attending or learning. Similarly in sports: the tennis
player or batter is taking their “eye off the ball” (i.e. pulling their head out instead of
keeping your head still as you swing), yet few novice players “see” that they are not really
“seeing the ball.” They often protest, in fact, when the feedback is given. The same thing
happens with some domineering students in class discussion: they are so busy “discussing”
that they fail to see their unhelpful effects on the discussion and on others who give up
trying to participate.
That’s why it is vital, at even the highest levels of performance, to get feedback from
coaches (or other able observers) and/or video to help us perceive what we may not
perceive as we perform; and by extension, to learn to look for what is difficult but vital to
perceive. That’s why I would recommend that all teachers video their own classes at least
once per month and do some walk-throughs and learning walks, to more fully appreciate
how we sometimes have blind spots about what is and isn’t happening as we teach. It was a
transformative experience for me when I did it 40 years ago (using a big Sony reel-to-reel
deck before there were VHS cassettes!). What was clear to me as the teacher of the lesson
in real time seemed downright confusing on tape – visible also in some quizzical looks of
my students that I had missed in the moment. And, in terms of improving discussion or
Socratic Seminar, video can be transformative: when students see snippets of tape of their
prior discussions they are fascinated to study it and surprised by how much gets missed in
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the fast flow of conversation. (Coaches of all sports have done this for decades; why is it
still so rare in classrooms?)
3. Actionable information. Thus, feedback is actionable information – data or facts that you
can use to improve on your own since you likely missed something in the heat of the
moment. No praise, no blame, no value judgment – helpful facts. I hear when they laugh and
when they don’t; I adjust my jokes accordingly. I see now that 8 students are off task as I
teach, and take action immediately. I see my classmates roll their eyes as I speak – clearly
signaling that they are unhappy with something I said or the way I said it. Feedback is that
concrete, specific, useful. That is not to say that I know what the feedback means, i.e. why
the effect happened or what I should do next (as in the eye rolling), merely that the
feedback is clear and concrete. (That’s why great performers aggressively look for and go
after the meaning of feedback.)
Thus, “good job!” and “You did that wrong” and “B+” on a paper are not feedback at all. In
no case do I know what you saw or what exactly I did or didn’t do to warrant the
comments. The responses are without any actionable information. Here is a question we
can easily imagine learners asking themselves in response, to see this: Huh? What
specifically should I do more of and less of next time, based on this information? No idea. The
students don’t know what was “good” or “wrong” about what they did.
Some readers may object that feedback is not so black and white, i.e. that we may disagree
about what is there to be seen and/or that feedback carries with it a value judgment about
good and bad performance. But the language in question is usually not about feedback
(what happened) but about an (arguable) inference about what happened. Arguments are
rarely about the results, in other words; they are typically about what the results mean.
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For example, a supervisor of a teacher may make an unfortunate but common mistake of
stating that “many students were bored” in class. No, that’s a judgment, not a goal-based
specific fact. It would have been far more useful and less debated had the supervisor said
something like: “I counted inattentive behaviors lasting more than 5-10 seconds in 12 of
the 25 students once the lecture was well underway. The behaviors included 2 students
texting under desks, 2 passing notes, and 7-8 students at any one time making eye contact
with other students, etc. However, when you moved to the small-group exercise using the
‘mystery text’, I saw such off-task behavior in only 1 student.” These are goal-related
factual statements, not judgments. Again, it doesn’t mean that the supervisor is correct in
the facts and it certainly doesn’t mean they are anti-lecture; it only means that the
supervisor tries to stick to facts and not jump to glib inferences – what is working and what
isn’t.
Such care in offering neutral goal-related facts is the whole point of the clinical supervision
of teaching and of good coaching more generally. Effective supervisors and coaches work
hard to carefully observe and comment on what was perceived, in reference to shared
goals. That’s why I always ask when visiting a class: Given your goals for the class, what
would you like me to look for and perhaps count or code?
In my years of experience as a teacher of teachers, as an athletic coach, and as a teacher of
adolescents I have always found such “pure” feedback to be accepted, not debated; and be
welcomed (or at least not resisted). Performers are on the whole grateful for a 2nd pair of
eyes and ears, given our blind spots as we perform. But the legacy of so much heavyhanded inferencing and gratuitous advice by past coaches/teachers/supervisors has made
many performers – including teachers – naturally wary or defensive.
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FEEDBACK
What effective coaches also know is that actionable feedback about what went right is as
important as feedback about what didn’t work in complex performance situations. (That’s
why the phrase “corrective information” is not strictly-speaking accurate in describing all
feedback.) Performers need feedback about what they did correctly because they don’t
always know what they did, particularly as novices. It is not uncommon in coaching, when
the coach describes what a performer successfully did (e.g. “THAT time you kept your head
still and followed all the way through!”), to hear the performer respond quizzically, “I
did??” Similarly the writer or teacher is sometimes surprised to learn that what she
thought was unimportant in her presentation was key to audience understanding.
Comedians, teachers, and artists don’t often accurately predict which aspects of their work
will achieve the best results, but they learn from the ones that do. That’s why feedback can
be called a reinforcement system: I learn by learning to do more of (and understand) what
works and less of what doesn’t.
4. User friendly. Feedback is thus not of much value if the user cannot understand it or is
overwhelmed by it, even if it is accurate in the eyes of experts or bystanders. Highlytechnical feedback to a novice will seem odd, confusing, hard to decipher: describing the
swing in baseball in terms of torque and other physics concepts to a 6-year-old will not
likely yield a better hitter. On the other hand, generic ‘vagoo’ feedback is a contradiction in
terms: I need to perceive the actionable, tangible details of what I did.
When I have watched expert coaches, they uniformly avoid either error of too much overlytechnical information or of unspecific observations: they tell the performers one or two
important things they noticed that, if they can be changed, will likely yield immediate and
noticeable improvement (“I noticed you were moving this way…”), and they don’t offer
advice until they are convinced the performer sees what they saw (or at least grasps the
importance of what they saw).
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5. Timely. The sooner I get feedback, then, the better (in most cases). I don’t want to wait
hours or days to find out which jokes they laughed at or didn’t, whether my students were
attentive, or which part of my paper works and doesn’t. My caveat – “in most cases” – is
meant to cover situations such as playing a piano piece in recital: I don’t want either my
teacher or the audience to be barking out feedback as I perform. That’s why it is more
precise to say that good feedback is “timely” rather than “immediate.”
A great problem in education, however, is the opposite. Vital feedback on key performances
often comes days, weeks, or even months after the performance – think of writing and
handing in papers and getting back results on standardized tests. If we truly realize how
vital feedback is, we should be working overtime as educators to figure out ways to ensure
that students get more timely feedback and opportunities to use it in class while the
attempt and effects are still fresh in their minds. (Keep in mind: as we have said, feedback
does not need to come from the students’ teachers only or even people at all, before you
say that this is impossible. This is a high-priority and solvable problem to address locally.)
6. Ongoing. It follows that the more I can get such timely feedback, in real time, before it is
too late, the better my ultimate performance will be – especially on complex performance
that can never be mastered in a short amount of time and on a few attempts. That’s why we
talk about powerful feedback “loops” in a sound learning system.
All adjustment en route depends upon feedback and multiple opportunities to use it. This is
really what makes any assessment truly “formative” in education. The feedback is
“formative” not merely because it precedes “summative” assessments but because the
performer has many opportunities - if results are less than optimal - to adjust the
performance to better achieve the goal. Many so-called formative assessments do not build
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in such feedback use. If we truly understood how feedback works, we would make the
student’s use of feedback part of the assessment! It is telling that in the adult world I am
often judged as a performer on my ability to adjust in light of feedback since no one can be
perfect.
This is how all highly-successful computer games work, of course. If you play Angry Birds,
Halo, Guitar Hero, or Tetris you know that the key to the substantial improvement possible
is that the feedback is not only timely but ongoing. When you fail, you can immediately
start over – even, just where you left off – to give you another opportunity to get, receive
and learn from the feedback before all is lost to forgetfulness. (Note, then, this additional
aspect of user-friendly feedback: it suits our need, pace and ability to process information;
games are built to reflect and adapt to our changing ability to assimilate information.)
Do you see a vital but counter-intuitive implication from the power of many ‘loops’ of
feedback? We can teach less, provide more feedback, and cause greater learning than if we
just teach. Educational research supports this view even if as “teachers” we flinch
instinctively at this idea.. That is why the typical lecture-driven course is so ineffective: the
more we keep talking, the less we know what is being grasped and attended to. That is why
the work of Eric Mazur at Harvard – in which he hardly lectures at all to his 200 students
but instead gives them problems to solve and discuss, and then shows their results on
screen before and after discussion using LRS ‘clickers’ – is so noteworthy. His students get
“less” lecturing” but outperform their peers not only on typical tests of physics but
especially on tests of misconceptions in physics. [Mazur (1998)]
7. Consistent. For feedback to be useful it has to be consistent. Clearly, I can only monitor
and adjust successfully if the information fed back to me is stable, unvarying in its accuracy,
and trustworthy. In education this has a clear consequence: teachers have to be on the
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same page about what is quality work and what to say when the work is and is not up to
standard. That can only come from teachers constantly looking at student work together,
becoming more consistent (i.e. achieving inter-rater reliability) over time, and formalizing
their judgments in highly-descriptive rubrics supported by anchor products and
performances. By extension, if we want student-to-student feedback to be more helpful,
students have to be trained the same way we train teachers to be consistent, using the
same exemplars and rubrics.
What isn’t feedback – even though we often speak as if it were?
Though feedback is best defined as goal-related effects, in everyday speech we use the
word more loosely – unhelpfully so. Consider the following examples of so-called feedback
and note how these examples do not reflect our definition – even if many people think of
these comments as feedback:
 “Good job!”
 “You might want to use a lighter baseball bat”
 “What was your reason for choosing that as the setting of your story?”
 “I know you can try harder than that”
 “That was a weak presentation”
 “You need more examples in your report”
 “This is a ‘C’ paper, alas.”
 “You’ve done better in the past”
 “I’m so pleased by your poster!”
 “You should have some Essential Questions in your unit plan”
None of these is an example of feedback, if you apply the seven criteria we identified above.
There is no information about what happened. Rather, in all these examples there is a
response to what happened: advice, evaluation, or questions.
Feedback vs. advice. Consider these three statements taken from the list:
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
You need more examples in your report

You might want to use a lighter baseball bat

You should have some Essential Questions in your unit plan
This is not feedback. This is advice (sometimes called feed forward to make the contrast
more clear). In response to a performance with apparently less than optimal effects, a
teacher-coach gives guidance on how to improve the performance. In other words, advice
or guidance is made after a result or effect (i.e. the feedback) has occurred, and where the
performer may need assistance in acting on the feedback to improve.
However, such advice only makes sense to the performer (and, in my experience, is only
truly welcomed by the performer) on the heels of specific feedback. For these pieces of
advice to work, I need to first know the feedback upon which the advice is based. Far too
many coaches, teachers and parents, however, jump right to advice without ensuring first
that the learner grasps the feedback. And over time – if you count it up – most of us give far
more advice than descriptive feedback.
My immediate internal question as a performer, upon hearing advice first – without
feedback preceding it – would be to ask myself: Why are they suggesting this? Is this
appropriate? Or is it just their pet thing? Advice out of the blue always seems at best a
tangent and at worst unhelpful and annoying. “Why should I use ‘more’ examples? Is the
point lots of examples or really good examples? Aren’t my examples OK? Or, is this really
the teacher’s indirect way of saying my examples aren’t good enough?…” That is often how
the performer feels on the heels of lots of advice with little or no feedback preceding it.
What may be hard for habit-bound teachers, coaches, and parents to realize is that advice is
often unhelpful unless I am ready for it. What does “ready for it” mean here? When we 1)
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share the same goal; 2) when I am helped to perceive and/or acknowledge what I am not
perceiving as I perform – the feedback; 3) when I understand and we agree about the
meaning of the feedback; and 4) when I am psychologically ready to confront the gap
between my intent an the results, and take advice. No wonder mere advice is often
ineffectual!
Recall the examples of pure feedback I gave at the outset of this essay. In all of these
instances the performer was not given any advice. Rather, any advice was self-given, based
on the clarity and specificity of the feedback. Amazingly, learners can often give themselves
any needed advice, even when they are relative novices, if they have seen models and been
given good instruction. So, if your ratio of advice to feedback is too heavy on the advice, try
asking the learner: “Given the feedback, do you have some ideas about how to improve?” If
not, only then offer one piece of practical advice. This is how greater autonomy and
confidence are built over the long haul.
Too much advice, rather than building autonomy and self-directed learning via feedback,
easily undercuts it. Students then easily become insecure about their own judgment and
more dependent upon the advice of others – and thus in a panic about what to do when
different advice comes from different people or no advice is available at all. “Is this what
you want? Is this right?” asked constantly is important feedback to you, the teacher, that the
ratio of feedback to advice is not optimal.
Please don’t misunderstand. I am not saying don’t give advice. Good advice is certainly
better than floundering around trying to find the best path that perhaps only an expert
knows. I am saying that too much advice combined with too little feedback will not achieve
the results we seek: high levels of performance and performer autonomy.
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As a consequence, you will want to take the time to teach learners to seek, find, and learn
from available feedback – teach them, in other words, to be less and less dependent upon
you as advice-giver and feedback-giver, and more on themselves. (That will also make
them more ready to be coached when performance doesn’t improve.)
This advice about ratio is based on a well-known season-long study of the legendary
basketball coach John Wooden, [See Nater & Gallimore (2005)] Wooden was famous for
quickly and always calling attention to errors and suggesting how to correct them. Fully
10% of his entire output of words was labeled as a “Wooden” in a season of closely
watching and coding everything he said. A “Wooden” involved quickly saying: “Here’s the
right way to do x, here’s what you did, so instead you want to do x.” Or more generally:
model-feedback-advice.
Finally, feedback is information. So, how could a question be feedback? (“What was your
reason for choosing that as the setting of your story?”) Many educators are surprisingly
confused by this point. “But questioning is a good thing! We are probing the student to get
at their thinking!” True. Just don’t conflate asking questions with giving useful feedback.
Your questioning isn’t giving the performer actionable information; it’s delaying it! You
may want me to think about what I am doing but that won’t yield more feedback. I don’t
want to keep writing badly, making people not laugh or striking out but only have Socrates
for a coach just asking me questions! I want my coach to tell me what just happened that I
might not have noticed, and perhaps how it might be improved.
Feedback vs. evaluation. Let’s look at another group of questionable feedback to see what
they have in common and how they differ from pure feedback (even if we loosely call such
comments “feedback”):
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



Good job!
That was a weak presentation
This is a ‘C’ paper, alas.
I’m so pleased by your poster!
These comments make a value judgment. They rate, evaluate, praise or blame what was
done. There is little or no feedback here, i.e. actionable information about what occurred.
As performers, we only know that someone is either pleased or not, or that someone places
a high or low value on what we did. Praise (and sometimes, blame) may motivate us in the
short term but neither can get us better. Over time, both praise and blame have a corrosive
effect, in fact (as Dweck [2008] shows in her research on the attitudes of achievers): such
performers often become too extrinsically motivated. They then try primarily to please or
avoid disapproval and have great difficulty once they start to fail as the challenge increases.
Now they have lost sight of not only the feedback but the goal. “I am so pleased with your
poster!” – no, my aim was not to please you but to satisfy myself and the performance
requirements. The goal was not to make the teacher, coach, or parent feel better; the goal
was to achieve a worthy result and in the long term build more autonomous self-regulating
and self-improving performance.
Look back at the evaluative comments. How might those comments be re-cast to be useful
feedback if the value words slipped out? Tip: always add a mental colon after each
statement of value with what happened and what it means: “Good job: your use of words
was more precise in this paper than in the last one, and saw I saw the scenes in my mind’s
eye more clearly.” “Not so good on this essay: Almost from the first sentence, I was
confused as to your initial thesis X and the evidence Y you were providing for it. In the 2nd
paragraph you propose a somewhat different thesis Z and in the 3rd paragraph you don’t
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offer evidence, just beliefs A and B.” You will soon find that you can drop the evaluative
language; it serves no useful function.
By extension, relying on grades as the key feedback is doomed to fail, if the aim is to cause
significant self-regulated improvement in student achievement. Grades are so ubiquitous,
so much a part of the landscape of schooling that we easily overlook their utter uselessness
as feedback. Consider the following thought experiments to see why:

How would tennis players improve if all the coach did was shout out letter grades as they
played, and the player never saw models or video of what they should be doing vs. what
they are doing?

How would the public speaker become skilled and poised if there were never a real
audience and if the judges merely filled out evaluation sheets and sent scores a week later
to the speaker?

How would cross country runners improve if we graded them on their place of finish in
each meet instead of reporting their times and how today’s times related to previous times?

How would piano players improve if they couldn’t hear themselves play and they received
an accuracy and speed single-letter summative grade only from expert judges a week later?
Grades are here to stay, no doubt – but that doesn’t in any way condone a teacher relying
on them as the main source of feedback.
Genuine vs. phony formative assessment: pacing. A grade on a test or paper given once is as
little likely to improve student performance in the future as being given only a grade
instead of split times, in response to your performance as a runner in the mile. Thus, what
are called “pacing guides” and “interim assessments” in schools and districts often
undercut the idea of feedback as we have considered it.
© Grant Wiggins 2012
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My daughter runs the mile in track. At the end of each lap in races and practice races, the
coaches are yelling out splits (i.e. the times for each lap) and bits of feedback (You’re not
swinging your arms!”), followed sometimes by advice: “Priscilla, you’re on pace for 5:20.
Pick it up: you need to take 3 seconds off this next lap!” is a common thing to hear at track
meets (and other timed sports, like swimming and cross country.) The ability to improve
one’s result depends upon the ability to adjust one’s pace in light of ongoing feedback
against the concrete long-term goal.
However, to say that a coach is giving pace-related information means that my daughter
and her teammates are getting feedback about how they are performing now against the
final desired time. The desired result for my daughter this season is a 5:00 mile. She has
already run 5:09. The coach is telling her, therefore, that at the pace she ran in the first lap
she is unlikely even to meet her best time so far this season, never mind her long-term goal.
Then, he gives her a brief piece of concrete advice – take 3 seconds off the next lap – in
order to make achievement of the goal more likely.
But this isn’t what most school district “pacing guides” and grades on “formative” tests tell
you. They tell you the schedule of teaching, not what to look for in the emerging results!
And they yield a grade against the most recent objectives, not useful feedback against the
future performance standards. It’s as if at the end of the first lap of the mile race, Priscilla’s
coach simply yells out B+ based on her having run the yards so far.
Advice for how to change this sad situation should be clear from the feedback in the
analysis: score student work in the fall and winter against spring standards; use more preand post-assessments to measure progress; do item analysis to note the kinds of errors
that need to be worked on for better future performance, etc. What is also implied but well
beyond the scope of this paper is the need to test for student performance in using content,
© Grant Wiggins 2012
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FEEDBACK
not content knowledge per se, since transfer of learning is the ultimate goal of learning –
and is actually what all harder test questions demand. [See Wiggins (2011)]
“But there’s no time!” The universal teacher lament of there being no time for such
feedback and opportunities to use it should now seem somewhat questionable to you as a
reader, if I have succeeded in making my case. For, as common-sense such a lament first
appears, it betrays a great misunderstanding. “No time to give and use feedback” means
you are saying that “there is no time to cause learning since I have so much teaching to do.”
This confusion also overlooks the fact that most useful feedback is picked up by the
performer directly from what happened in the situation at hand, while trying to accomplish
a task; and there are numerous ways – through technology, peers, and other teachers – that
students can get the feedback they needs. This is also why self-assessment specifically and
meta-cognition in general correlate so highly with academic success.3
Conclusion
What I have said may hopefully seem like be a helpful look at a key idea but what I am
saying is hardly new. William James, over one hundred years ago, wrote that effective
education requires that we “receive sensible news of our behavior and its results. We hear
the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander’s eyes
the success or failure of our conduct. Now this return wave...pertains to the completeness
of the whole experience.”4
Alas, teaching too much is our Achilles heel – we can’t help ourselves as “teachers.” So,
make an effort to try it: less teaching, more feedback. And its corollary: less advice, more
3 See Bransford et al (2001), pp. xx.
4 James, William (1899/1958), p. 41.
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FEEDBACK
tangible feedback. Less feedback that requires you to give it all, and more feedback
designed into the performance itself (as in music, sports and video games). Finally, send me
some feedback on this article: gwiggins@authenticeducation.org.
References
Bransford et al (2001) How People Learn. National Academy Press.
Clarke, Shirley (2001) Unlocking Formative Assessment: Practical Strategies for Enhancing
Pupils’ Learning in the Primary Classroom. Hodder Murray.
Dweck, Carol (2007) Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Ballantine.
Gilbert, Thomas (1978) Human Competence. McGraw Hill.
Harvard Business School Press, Giving Feedback (2006)
Hattie, John (2008) Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to
Achievement, Routledge.
James, William (1899/1958) Talks to Teachers. W W Norton.
Marzano, R ; Pickering, D & Pollock J (2001) Classroom Instruction That Works: ResearchBased Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement, ASCD.
Mazur, Eric (1996) Peer Instruction: A User's Manual. Benjamin Cummings.
Nater, Sven & Gallimore R (2005) You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned: John
Wooden's Teaching Principles and Practices. Fitness Info Tech.
Pollock, Jane (2012) Feedback: the hinge that joins teaching and learning, Corwin Press.
Wiggins, Grant (2010) “Time to Stop Bashing the Tests,” Educational Leadership March 2010
| Volume 67 | Number 6
Wiggins, Grant (1998) Educative Assessment, Jossey-Bass.
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