Diagnostic Feedback in the Classroom

Abstract

Diagnostic assessment enables teachers to make inferences about learners’ strengths and weaknesses in the skills being taught. Teachers may provide students with diagnostic feedback to make positive changes in their learning. This pedagogical desire for classroom diagnostic assessment resonates well with formative assessment and differentiates it from clinical diagnosis. However, this formative potential to advance student learning is only realized when diagnostic feedback is used by teachers and learners. The ways in which this feedback is interpreted and utilized depend on a range of variables at individual and structural (e.g., classroom, schools, and community) levels. Questioning the assumption that learners are passive recipients of feedback, the chapter probes conditions and variables that enable or inhibit the maximal use of diagnostic feedback. While the focus of diagnosis is students’ cognitive competence, the parameters of diagnostic assessment involve more than a cognitive dimension. Viewing students as change agents in diagnostic assessment requires consideration of noncognitive learner characteristics such as students’ attitude to learning and assessment, especially their goal orientations. Students’ mastery goals are shown to be related to adaptive outcomes, persistence, and effective self‐regulatory strategies that facilitate performance on assessment tasks. Few studies have examined whether there is a direct link between students’ goal orientations and their attitudes to and use of diagnostic feedback. The chapter examines whether students’ goal orientations serve as a gateway to understanding how students may interpret assessment feedback and use it in their learning. Other structural conditions, beyond individual orientations, are also explored in order to understand the role of context, where individual learners’ attitudes and goal orientations are shaped and influenced through the interaction with other learners, teachers, parents, and social norms. The chapter examines these relationships by drawing from multiple small‐scale studies engaging English language learners, and argues that the effectiveness of diagnostic feedback is achieved when the complex nature of language learners’ goal structures situated in sociocultural learning contexts is considered.

Foreign Language Teachers’ Feedback Practices: a Comparative Study

“…In the classroom, feedback can serve to diagnose strengths and weaknesses in the skills being taught in order to make positive changes in students' learning, thus carrying out diagnostic formative assessment (Jang & Wagner, 2014). Indeed, assessment builds a picture of young learners' (YLs) progress over time.…”

The Effects of Holistic Diagnostic Feedback Intervention on Improving Struggling Readers’ Reading Skills

“…Feedback is described by Winne and Butler (1994) as "information with which a learner can confirm, add to, and overwrite, tune, or restructure information in memory, whether that information is domain knowledge, meta-cognitive knowledge, beliefs about self and tasks, or cognitive tactics and strategies" (p. 5740). Previous research on feedback has been predominantly focused on feedback type and feedback delivery mode (Jang, 2014). Further, feedback also tended to be treated as a fixed stimulus to which learners respond uniformly (Ferris, 2003).…”

To feed back or to feed forward?

“…Alderson et al, 2015;Jang & Wagner 2013), much of the FL/L2 literature appears to regard informing students "of the accuracy of their response" as the primary purpose of feedback (see e.g. Leontjev, 2016, p. 18).…”

“…Accordingly, most FL/L2 feedback research focuses on corrective feedback, i.e. correcting language errors (Alderson et al, 2015;Jang & Wagner, 2013). There has been a lively debate about the efficacy of corrective feedback in L2 writing and acquisition literature over the past couple of decades (see e.g.…”

“…Most importantly, the bulk of FL/L2 feedback research has primarily been concerned with corrective feedback (CF), i.e. oral or written error correction only (Alderson, Haapakangas, Huhta, Nieminen, & Ullakonoja, 2015;Jang & Wagner, 2013). Yet, classroom research on students' experiences of and responses to feedback in general, and not just to CF, would be important in order to further develop foreign language assessment practices that facilitate and foster learning (see also Hyland, 2010).…”