Feedback

​It has been a year since I last wrote a post. I haven't had the luxury of time to sit down and reflect as it has been a really hectic year for me. Every day, I teach in the same familiar environment but each day, the journey seems different. While my students acquire knowledge from me and make progress, I have gained invaluable knowledge from them as well. Children need to be told explicitly what to do and what not to do, but adults are able to make clear inference just by looking at other's responses or expressions. (I guess any working parents who have fiery bosses can easily relate to what I’m saying.)

In the last post, we talked about conditioning and reinforcement. They can be seen as goals for your children, rewarding them if they were to achieve their targets. However, if you fail to guide your child along the way or provide the necessary support to reach their goals, they may drown in the process of learning. Hence, it is vital to provide feedbacks as and when it is necessary.

In giving feedbacks, not only is it vital for your children to learn to differentiate right from wrong but more importantly, they have to correct their mistakes.

I do not think it is necessary for me to discuss the “correct” method that your child should be taught because there are billions of questions, hundreds of subjects and infinite approaches to all these questions, depending on the multitude of your child’s learning ability. Hence I will focus on something that is more applicable to most children, or in fact anyone with the ability to learn well.

Psychologist have long studied the effects of feedbacks on human beings. Our journey in life is guided by feedbacks from people around us, transforming us into who we are today. We get feedbacks every day and we learn every day, whether we want it or not.

Adults usually learn faster since they are more knowledgeable and are able to receive feedbacks which children are less capable of. When your colleague does not find a joke that you crack hilarious, it immediately sends a signal to you that his sense of humour is not in sync with yours. As for kids, especially younger ones, even when they are told explicitly that a joke is not funny, they may still crack the same joke on another occasion to the same audience.

The question here is, how do we ensure that kids will learn fast like adults? The answer is simple – ensure that children receive feedbacks as frequently as adults.

Aren't we already doing that? Yes, we are. But are these explicit feedbacks frequent enough? Frequency wise, in school, your children only hear from their teachers about their performance 4 times a year, during CAs and SAs. Every 3 months or so, schools will make sure that their students understand what they are taught in the class. When the teachers discover who are the ones that are unable to catch up with their peers, these pupils will be stream to a class whereby everyone is learning at a similar pace and provided the necessary afterschool remedial to help them.

Isn't it too late when your child have lacked behind others and have to catch up the next year along with the new year of information? Definitely.

Is the school to blame? No, it is a big organization managing a nation of kids. We cannot expect streaming to occur every month or so.

Then what should we do? As mentioned earlier, teachers and parents have to provide feedbacks on a more frequent basis. Many parents have the mentality that corrections and marking of assessments from school are enough to help their children. But the truth is, even though teachers have explained and wrote down the corrections, very few students will actually let the teacher know that they do not have a clear grasp of what is taught since the easy way out for kids is to "copy down the answers on the board in green". Hence, the spiral continues; the more doubts the students have, the harder it is for them to catch up later on. In the months to follow, the child will not even bother to think whether he or she understands the solution given because we all know how demoralising it is when we do not understand the basic of a simple concept that is built into a bigger concept and mapped into a question. Before long, all hope to do well is lost in the subject.

Another issue is that younger children tend to have difficulties recognizing feedbacks given to them. Hence, the educator (parents, teachers etc.) have to step in and tell them the messages explicitly and in layman terms.

Parents should take time out daily, otherwise weekly at the minimal, to ask their child if they understand why they are wrong and if they know the correct solutions. If they say no, help them. If they say yes, ask them to explain to you. This is not because you do not trust them, it is to make sure that they fully understand what they are taught. A simple example will be that many students think that a battery contains electricity which provides energy for the light bulb to lit but in actual fact, batteries do not contain electricity. A battery contains the chemicals necessary to produce the electricity to light up the bulb.

Hence, parents should check children's understanding frequently and provide feedback to prevent culmulative poor understanding. More importanly the feedback have to be explicit since children is poor in recognizing feedbacks.