The Importance Of Positive Feedback

Teachers are responsible for educating future generations, as they have been for centuries, but is there something that they could add to their routines to create more significant impacts on these developing minds? How can teachers help their students succeed with little additional effort? According to several studies, positive feedback may be the key to not only increasing mastery of a subject but also reducing the risk of students developing emotional or behavioral disorders and improving their academic achievement.

Researchers Mitrovic, Ohlsson, and Barrow (2013) designed an experiment to determine if the addition of positive feedback to a negative feedback tutoring system would reduce student uncertainty that would, therefore, reduce the

(2015) set up a study that relied more on the perceived feedback of teachers to students. While, again, positive feedback does not constitute the main focus of this study, it does include the human aspect of perception. Feedback needs to be perceived by the students in such a way that the teachers intended it to be. The goal of the researchers was to find out the importance of homework, more specifically, they wanted to determine if there was an association between perceived teacher feedback and the students’ homework-related behaviors and academic achievement. To measure teacher feedback, the researchers asked the 454 participating students to fill out a survey that asked the students to rate their teachers, in general, on a five-point scale which included questions such as whether the teachers provide positive reinforcements for completed homework or allowed students to go over their homework in class. While this feedback was not as well defined as the Mitrovic et al. (2013) study, the perceived feedback in the Núñez et al. (2015) study was generally positive or negative. The higher the students scored the teachers, the more positive it was interpreted. Homework-related behaviors were also determined by using a five-point scale that determined how much time a student spends doing homework, the amount of homework completed, and homework management. Academic achievement was found by the final grade

(2015) study one step further by directly and objectively observing the teacher-student interactions. These observations are more applicable and have greater external validity than the subjective questionnaires as each observer was trained to report objective and well-defined instances of positive and negative feedback as they occurred in a classroom setting. Núñez et al. (2015), set up a research design to out if there was a difference in the number of positive and negative feedback provided between children at high and low risk for emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD). The researchers conducted their experiment in eight schools of the same district and chose 56 classrooms and teachers to observe. From the 56 classrooms, two students were randomly selected to be the target students. One student that was randomly selected was at high-risk for developing EBD, and one was at low-risk as determined by an empirically tested screening scale. The researchers found that teachers, on average, had a ratio of 1:1 for positive to negative feedback with the entire class population. This ratio was used as a baseline to compare the target students to in the second phase of the study. After conducting observations ten times for 20 minutes each, the researchers concluded that high-risk students received a ratio of 1:2 instances of positive to negative feedback while low-risk students had a ratio of 3:1. Sprouls et al. (2015), set