.4 Modifying Instruction Based on Feedback

Modifying your instruction based on feedback is not simple. You can't just say, "Well if they're not getting it, I should change the instructional design." This can be problematic because it may be that students don't look like they're getting it now, but next week they will. Be very sophisticated in the way you use the feedback to modify your instruction. One of the approaches is comprehensive student monitoring. There is a stereotype that learning takes place like this: You start from nothing and you go straight to June. The students supposedly learn everything at a steady rate and by the end of the year know everything that you have taught them. This stereotype is, unfortunately, wrong.

We did an experiment at Stanford with a student French teacher. We gave them a weekly "final" exam to see how well they mastered the material as it was being taught to them. At the beginning we expected them to do poorly and then as the school year progressed, to do better and better. Every week we retested to measure how well each student improved from the week before.

It was a disaster! When we gave the final exam on the first day of class, we told the class what we were doing and we put a big chart up on the board illustrating the class' learning curve.

On the first day, three students got A's on the final exam. The reason this was so disastrous was that these were the students the teacher would like to take credit for at the end of the semester -- these were the star kids in the class. Our early final exam showed us that they already knew the course material, though, so this prevented the teacher from taking credit for their success. To find out that they already know the stuff you're going to teach takes all the wind out of your sails. But at least we had a baseline.

At the end of the next week we gave another test. The scores went down. We were astounded. How can scores go down? It looked like students were unlearning things -- forgetting things they already knew!

The next week they went down again.
The third week they went down further.

What in the world was going on? It was total chaos. Parents and students were very concerned. The cooperating teacher was the head of the department - a very effective teacher and supervisor. He was totally bewildered: "The student's doing a great job, she's doing everything right. What's going on here?" If we could have quietly stolen into the classroom and wadded that chart up on the board and thrown it away, we would have gladly done it. However, we were in the middle of a big experiment. We were locked in.

Fortunately, in the fourth week the scores went up. At the end of the ninth week scores were even higher than we predicted.

We looked at the instruction very carefully. What we now know is that when students learn new material, confusion is often produced. Performance may actually GO DOWN as students are struggling to learn new skills. In fact, this is not an unusual learning curve.

Another learning curve describes the perversity of potential learning curves for individual students.

You teach and nothing happens, and then all of a sudden they get it.

Now, if the final exam comes in the ideal spot, right after all the students have mastered the material, all is well.

If it comes too late, time has been wasted where the students aren't learning anything.

If the final exam comes too early, it's a huge disaster.

As you can see here, when and where the final exam comes is an absolutely crucial part of the learning process. Feedback is vital because interpreting it in a professional way will inform the teacher where the students are in their learning curves, and thus ensure that testing is done properly.

	Why is feedback vital to teachers?	Answer Here
	Mrs. Copeland is an Algebra II teacher that has no idea where to start with this term's class. The students all came from different teachers for Algebra I, and some know much more than others do. How can she effectively make sure that all of her students learn from her class regardless of what they learned in the previous years?	Answer Here