Memorable feedback: Lessons from cognitive psychology in selective attention

As assessment specialists in a large public school district, our jobs involve working with teachers to develop useful classroom assessments and use assessment data to help students learn. Along the way, we’ve found two bodies of literature to be useful during conversations with teachers: cognitive psychology literature related to memory models, and assessment literature related to effective feedback. Through our work and conversations, we see multiple connections between these two bodies of literature: selective attention (the focus of this first post), encoding/deep processing, and retrieval practice. The purpose of this series of blog posts is to highlight three potentially useful connections between these research areas. These observations may help other teachers and administrators find new ways to use feedback within complex processes of teaching and learning.