E-Reflection week 11 Principle of effective teaching and assessment

          Good feedback practice is not only about providing good information to the students about learning but also providing good information to teachers. Yes, that’s what I’ve learned on the last meeting in PETA course and what I feel inside about the importance of the giving feedback in teaching and learning process.  It is very powerful and I think it’s potentially constructive learning tools. Teachers give feedback messages to students about the strength and weakness in their work assuming that these messages are easily decoded and turned into action. In Yorke’s assumption (2003), teachers need to be careful when delivering the feedback and don’t make the feedback falls short of what is actually necessary to help students close the gap in the learning process between the current learning achievements of the students and the goal set by the teacher. Based on my observation during school experience program last year, less incompatibility type of feedback given will give the negative impact for students. They became a pessimistic, unmotivated and lacking of self esteem because of teachers’ reprimand. In contrast, the positive feedback increased students’ motivation in learning and improved subsequent performance.

            Based on my experience, positive feedback is also effective to encourage teacher and peer dialogue around learning and deliver high quality information to students about learning. Let’s reflect on what we often do during group discussion activity in PETA course. There were always many feedbacks both teacher and the students when we discussed about some topics.  Of course, it became the evident that feedback as dialogue means is very crucial and don’t expect that the discussion activity will take place meaningfully and effectively without any feedback on it. I realized the importance of the feedback itself. As long as my existence especially in learning, the positive feedback from teacher and peers provides the additional information that can help me in reassess my knowledge and get an immediate response to difficulties. It also serves as an authoritative reference point against so that it directly helps me to check out and correct misunderstanding.    

            Finally, at the end of this reflection, I conclude that any model of feedback must take account of the way students make sense of and use, feedback information. When teaching trough feedback, teachers need to be aware of the feedback itself. Feedback should be relevant to the task and in hand and to students. Back to the purpose of using feedback in learning is actually to provide additional information that can improve students’ understanding about a material. It means that the higher the understanding and mastery of the material and learning outcomes, the higher the success rate of learning.

Himmatul ‘Aliyah

2010110030