Sixty college undergraduates read a 30-frame program on the human eye and either did or did riot receive feedback after each response. Subjects rated their degree of assuredness in the question alternatives selected, and all learners were posttested immediately and after a 1-week delay. High-confidence responses were remembered better if they were answered right in the program and were more likely to be corrected on the test if the program response was incorrect. The greater correctability of high-confidence errors was attributed to longer feedback study times. Feedback had little effect on low-confidence responses. When a subject failed to understand the program content, confidence was low and the feedback ineffective. These results were in strong support of a model relating feedback, confidence, and postresponse behavior.People tend to remember more from a programmed lesson when they are given immediate information about the correctness of their response (Anderson, Kulhavy, & Andre, 1971;Meyer, 1960). In fact, under conditions in which the subject cannot peek at the right answer before he responds, immediate feedback 1 is undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools in the arsenal of instructional design. Given this state of affairs, it is surprising that so little work has been done to specify the ways in which feedback acts to promote greater learning. True, there is substantial data which indicate that feedback operates primarily to correct error responses rather than "reinforcing" correct answers (
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