Cultural Variation in the Effectiveness of Feedback on Students’ Mistakes

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Kimmo Eriksson¹  Jannika Lindvall¹  Ola Helenius³  Andreas Ryve¹ 

[1] School of Education, Mälardalen University;Centre for Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University;University of Gothenburg

关键词: negative feedback;    power distance;    religiosity;    cultural values;    effective instruction;    mistakes;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03053

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

One of the many things teachers do is to give feedback on their students’ work. Feedback pointing out mistakes may be a key to learning, but it may also backfire. We hypothesized that feedback based on students’ mistakes may have more positive effects in cultures where teachers have greater authority over students, which we assume to be cultures that are high on power distance and religiosity. To test this hypothesis we analyzed data from 49 countries taking part in the 2015 wave of the TIMSS assessment, in which students in the 4th and 8th grades were asked whether their teachers in mathematics and science told them how to do better when they had made a mistake. For each country we could then estimate the association between the reported use of mistake-based feedback and student achievement. Consistent with our hypothesis, the estimated effect of mistake-based feedback was positive only in certain countries, and these countries tended to be high on power distance and religiosity. These results highlight the importance of cultural values in educational practice.

【 授权许可】

CC BY