Instructional Principle: In order for learners to receive maximum benefit from feedback, it should be supplied as soon as possible after performance of the activity.
Mature learners can often wait a few days or even weeks to find out whether their response was correct. There is even research to indicate that sometimes learners do their own assessments of correctness when teacher feedback is lacking. But in general, the best time to tell learners whether they were right or wrong is when they are most interested in this information - usually right after they have given their answer. For various reasons, classroom feedback is often delayed for minutes, hours, days, or even weeks.
Positive feedback (knowledge that you are right) is obviously important; but negative feedback (knowledge that you are wrong) is sometimes even more crucial, since a blissfully ignorant student may go on applying a misconception over and over before discovering the nature of this error. Corrective feedback is a specific type of negative feedback. It not only tells the learner that the answer was inaccurate, but also leads the learner to a correct understanding of the concept under consideration. Good corrective feedback is often the most important characteristic of a drill or tutorial.
The computer has the capacity to give almost instantaneous feedback (Figure 3.11)ADD NEWER EXAMPLES. When the student gives a response to a question that has a specific right or wrong answer, the computer can immediately indicate whether the answer was right or wrong. Moreover, the computer can be programmed to look for certain types of errors and give specific feedback, such as "It looks like you forgot to carry."
If a child has a paper-and-pencil worksheet with twenty problems, and she thinks she understands the concept but actually does not, she is likely to sit at her desk and work all twenty problems incorrectly and then turn it in for the teacher to correct. If she's really lucky, the teacher will correct the paper immediately, inform her of her mistake, and ask her to redo the assignment correctly. If the student is less lucky, the teacher may wait till the next day to return the paper and give it back after recording an F. If this same child had been working with a good computer program, she would have discovered her misunderstanding when she missed the first problem. She could have thought more carefully, obtained information from a mini-tutorial in the program, reread the textbook, or conversed with the teacher to clear up the misunderstanding; and then she could have solved the next nineteen problems correctly. The rapidity of the feedback provided by the computer is one of its strongest advantages.
Immediate Feedback
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