This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Prompting teachers to communicate high expectations and confidence in students' potential leads them to give more detailed feedback, according to a new study led by Yasemin Copur-Gencturk, Ph.D., a professor of education at USC Rossier and co-director of the USC STEM Center; Ian Thacker, Ph.D., an associate professor of educational psychology at The University of Texas at San Antonio; and Joseph Cimpian, Ph.D., a professor of economics and education policy at New York University. The study, which included nearly 1,000 elementary and middle school teachers across the United States, is the first to show that this kind of prompt can change the substance of what teachers tell students about their work.
The approach, known as "wise feedback," pairs high performance standards with an assurance that students can meet them. Students who receive wise feedback tend to be more trusting and perform at higher levels. "A relatively small prompt led teachers to give students more specific information about their performance, which is exactly what students need if feedback is going to support their learning," said Copur-Gencturk.
"Instead of a generic 'good job,' teachers pointed to the strengths and weaknesses in students' reasoning." The study is published in the journal Educational Researcher. The research team randomly assigned teachers to one of two groups. One group was asked to give feedback as they normally would in their classrooms.
The other was asked to communicate both high expectations and confidence in the student's ability to meet them. All teachers reviewed the same set of mathematical solutions. Each was paired with the image of a randomly assigned white or Black girl or boy presenting the solution in an online classroom environment.
That design let the researchers measure how the prompt changed teachers' feedback and whether its effect depended on a student's perceived race and gender. Overall, prompted teachers gave more detailed feedback than teachers who responded as usual. They were more likely to name both what students had done well and what they still needed to work on.
The prompt also changed how often teachers commented on students' ability and effort. Prompted teachers praised a student's math ability nearly four times as often as teachers who weren't prompted (8.1% of responses vs. 2.1%). The prompted teachers were also more than five times as likely to question a student's ability or say the student needed to work harder, though those comments stayed rare, under 3% of responses.
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