If you’re reading this blog, then you probably care about learning. A lot. If you’re a teacher, you want to foster as much learning in your classroom as possible. As a part of this, you probably try to give your students as much feedback as possible. You also probably have the sense that providing feedback as quickly as possible after an assignment is best. However, immediate feedback can be really difficult, if not impossible, to do. If you’re a student, you likely prefer immediate feedback to waiting for it. As a student, you may or may not have control over when feedback is delivered.
Historically, the idea that feedback should be immediate to best improve learning seems to come from behaviorism. Mullet and her coauthors provide a bit of history on this and quote Skinner. He suggested a delay of 24 hours to receive feedback was too long. (24 hours?! At least in my world, that’s fast.) Logically if we think about feedback as correcting errors, then it makes sense that we would want pretty immediate feedback. But if we think about feedback as another presentation of the information, then a space ought to improve learning.
Mullet and colleagues tested whether feedback was best immediately (or, at least more quickly) or after a delay. What I love about this paper is that they ran their experiments in real Engineering classrooms, which means the “immediate” feedback condition is at least sometimes practical. By immediate, they mean that the feedback was available immediately after the assignment deadline. So, not necessarily immediately after the students completed the assignment, but more quickly than in the delayed condition.
