Skinner and behaviorism with positive and negative reinforcements and punishments can also be considered as precursors to what the field currently views as instructional feedback ( Wiliam, 2018). To provide the reader with a brief historical overview, we will start from the early 20th century and consider Thorndike’s Law of Effect to be at the very inception of feedback research ( Thorndike, 1927 Kluger and DeNisi, 1996). Over the years, definitions and theories of feedback evolved, and scholars in the field continue to accumulate evidence attesting to feedback’s key role in student learning. The term feedback was appropriated into instructional contexts from the industry ( Wiliam, 2018), and the original definitions referred to feedback as information from an output that was looped back into the system. In our complementary review ( Panadero and Lipnevich, 2021) we further analyzed and compared the fourteen models with the goal to classify and integrate shared elements into a new comprehensive model.Ī Review of Feedback Models and Theories: Descriptions, Definitions, Empirical Evidence, and Conclusionsįor many decades, researchers and practitioners alike have been examining how information presented to students about their performance on a task may affect their learning ( Black and Wiliam, 1998 Lipnevich and Smith, 2018). The goal of this paper is to inform the field and to help both scholars and educators to select appropriate models to frame their research and intervention development. We concluded the review with eight main points reached from our analysis of the models. We selected 14 publications and described definitions, models, their background, and specific underlying mechanisms of feedback processes. Our aim with this review was to describe the most prominent models and theories, identified using a systematic, three-step approach. For this reason, scholars have been working on developing models and theories that explain how feedback works and which variables may contribute to student engagement with it. The positive effect of feedback on students’ performance and learning is no longer disputed.
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2Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science and Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, Spain.1Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, United States.