FEEDBACK: The Broken Loop in Higher Education – and How to Fix It
WHEN WE WANT TO LEARN a new skill in life, we try out a new behaviour. Some behaviours fulfill their intended purpose, while others do not. Feedback — signals from the environment that tell us whether or not the behaviour we produced had the intended effect — is essential to changing, adapting or modifying human behaviour. This is what learning is all about.
Whether or not a skill can be reproduced by an algorithm, learning any skill requires feedback and is essential to the measurement of learning. In the skills environment of the Fourth Industrial Revolution — wherein information is free and complex, interpersonal skills whose development requires textured, precise, timely personalized feedback have become the highest value contributions to human capital. The result: Feedback has become the critical missing link in higher education.
Learning Science and Practice: A Picture Emerges
The science of learning and teaching offers abundant evidence of the critical link between feedback and learning. In recent years, it has come to focus on identifying the right kinds of feedback for different people and learning environments: Whether you are learning a foreign language or a computer language; learning to supress impulses; or learning to communicate coherently, empathically and responsively — each requires specific types and sequences of feedback.
Timeliness, precision, intelligibility, actionability, repetition — all represent features of learning-enhancing and enabling feedback across different domains of knowledge, skill and expertise. The discipline of machine learning has made rapid advances in the last 10 years precisely because of its use of fast mechanisms that
