Bridging the knowledge gap

For some time I’ve held a deep fascination with the power of feedback. Why does it have such a huge impact on the learning and attainment of pupils? Feedback has held the top slot in our teaching and learning toolkit on what works best in schools ever since it was first unveiled in 2011.

If delivered well by teachers it can lead to a whopping extra 8 months in development in just one academic year. Could this be one of the keys we have been looking for to narrow the UK’s stark attainment gap between poorer pupils and their more privileged peers?  I immersed myself in the research literature on feedback. I even came up with my own definition (see below), and presented my top tips to teachers.

Yet I could see the eyes of politicians and journalists glaze over as I enthused about learning loops. This is not a simple, catchy solution to narrowing the attainment gap. It is at the heart of the highly complex and sophisticated job of teaching well in the classroom.

Most teachers got it immediately. But the research suggests that they do not practise what they preach: 40% of what teachers teach, children know already; 80% of pupils’ time is spent pretending to listen; and teachers tend to talk for 75% of a lesson. All these figures would be dramatically reduced if there was effective feedback in the classroom. Yet the Sutton Trust’s surveys show that schools do not prioritise feedback when thinking about how to use their PupilPremium funds for poorer pupils.

Well now the scientific basis for feedback’s impact is coming to light as educationalists share the latest insights from neuroscience and cognitive psychology. There have been some recent excellent blogs by teachers that go into this in great detail. But here are some of the headlines. Our brains are not wired to think and learn. On average our attention span is little more than ten minutes. Too much information triggers cognitive overload. And it takes at least three times for things to stick.

All these findings confirm why constant communication between pupils and teachers is so important. But perhaps the most elling insight concerns the ‘knowledge gap’. Debra Kidd explains it in her review of John Hattie’s latest book, Visible Learning and The Science of How we Learn: “Thinking requires a belief that one can succeed – we are programmed to be risk averse and so need to believe that the effort is worth the risk. In short, we are motivated by knowledge gaps but not by knowledge chasms…Great feedback provides a map – it is a mode of processing but also motivating and ensuring that a knowledge gap is bridgeable and does now become a chasm.” As Hattie (whose work was one of the early inspirations for our toolkit) says in his new tome: “The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows.”

Pitching the learning challenge just right is also about good neuro-chemistry. As David Fawcett explains to spark the neurones and create memory pupils need a dopamine rush prompted by a potential reward that is achievable in the classroom. Pitching a task too easy to pupils won’t inspire them; creating a task too difficult is a lost cause.

So the science appears to confirm what educational research has known all along. But it doesn’t necessarily offer teachers the practical steps to develop more effective feedback many have cried out for when I present our toolkit.  Practical steps will come from thefeedback programmes now being trialled and evaluated by the Education Endowment Foundation. The EEF has also announced a partnership with the Wellcome Trust to look at how neuroscience might be used in schools more generally. The Sutton Trust meanwhile is working on developing better evidence on how feedback between teachers can help in their professional development.

The research also suggests that feedback is a much more multi-layered skill than implied by the Assessment for Learning programme. But more could be done to work with teachers to spread good practice on effective feedback: without it our hopes to improve learning in our classrooms, particularly for poorer pupils, will surely be in vain.