EFG - 10

There is growing appreciation in the education literature that the efficacy of instructional feedback, from Early Years to Higher Education, depends upon how learners make sense of and use feedback as a means to improve their performance, enhance learning, or hone psychosocial skills (Winstone et al., 2017; Lipnevich & Smith, 2018). However, despite growth in empirical research in this area, the mechanisms of feedback uptake remain largely hidden in the ‘Black Box’, as first discussed in the seminal work of Black and Wiliam (1998). It is our intention to bridge this chasm, by moving beyond the predominance of self-report methods, and seeking to develop and test innovative research paradigms that open up the Black Box of feedback uptake. New understanding of the mechanisms via which feedback facilitates learning can lead to societal as well as scientific impact, by informing the design of feedback processes that maximize outcomes for learners.

Methodological approaches from cognitive psychology and learning sciences (e.g. eye-tracking, EEG, experience sampling) have potential to surface previously invisible elements of feedback processing, such as: how learners attend to and comprehend feedback comments in real-time; the cognitive biases that are activated at the point of feedback receptivity; real-time affective responses to feedback; the integration of feedback information into cognitive action plans; and how the implementation of feedback information is evident in behaviour.

Aims of the EFG:

1. To develop new research paradigms that can advance research in the area of instructional feedback, through bringing together a network of researchers in education, psychology, and cognitive science, to encourage the cross-fertilisation of ideas from different domains of inquiry.

2. To conduct pilot studies and share data drawn from these new research paradigms in order to underpin future research and provide initial description of the affective, cognitive, and behavioural mechanisms governing effective feedback processing.