THE FEEDBACK FALLACY IN LEARNING: MAKING PRACTICE AND INTERDISCIPLINARITY COUNT

Abstract

For decades, teachers and managers have used feedback to praise and criticize just about everything their students or employees do, mainly with a corrective purpose instead of improving performance. What should feedback be, and how literate should formative leaders and learners be so that feedback will fulfil its prophecy of improving their learning process and performance? Conversely, how do feedback strategies encourage or inhibit learning? This interdisciplinary paper contributes to the feedback scholarship by triangulating the main debates around feedback from a psycho-pedagogy and educational neuroscience point of view with contextual practice-based feedback examples from over seven years of university-level teaching and career mentorship experiences in cross-cultural engagements. This paper showcased cross-cultural feedback practices. Specifically, it used examples of feedback practices as a teaching tool, treatment, command, and costly commodity from the Romanian academic context. On the other hand, in the UK academic context, feedback was portrayed as being practised as a learner tool, coaching, dialogue, and feedforward. Consequently, this reflective, interdisciplinary and practice-based article contributes to the literature and practice of feedback.

Keywords

• feedback
• interdisciplinarity
• psycho-pedagogy
• reflective practice