Investigating Qualities of Teachers' Feedback Conversations for Fostering Reasoning and Feeling of Self-Worth in Learners: A tool called Feedback Mapping

Abstract

Teacher feedback has been identified throughout the educational literature as a powerful classroom intervention. However few tools exist that allow teachers to understand their own feedback practice. This study details a method for evaluating the feedback experiences of students. The feedback conversations of middle school science teachers were coded for length, initiation, reasoning, roles and critical position, and relationships between these qualities and student sense of self-worth were examined. Finding showed that feedback conversations tended to be short, rarely contained evidence of constructivist learning or reasoning, and teachers rarely expressed a critical position. It was also found that feedback experiences of students were tied to student self-worth indicated by overall score in the class. From what is learned, a process called Feedback Mapping is developed to visually capture this information and future recommendations for use of this process as a formative teaching tool for practitioners are made.