Feedback is a term often used by educators to refer to responses given to students about their behavior or
performance. Feedback is essential for students if they are to learn or if they are to develop classroom behavior that
is new or more subtle and “mature”. But feedback can only be fully effective if received as soon as possible, when it
is still relevant to the task or activity at hand which is usually as soon as possible (Reynolds, 1992). A score on a test
is more informative immediately after a test than after a six-month delay, when students may have forgotten much
of the content of the test. A teacher’s comment to a student about an inappropriate, off-task behavior may not be
especially welcome immediately after the behavior occurs, but it can be more influential and informative then;
later, both teacher and student have trouble remembering the context of the off-task behavior, and in this sense
may literally “not know what they are talking about”. The same is true for comments about a positive behavior by a
student: hearing a compliment right away makes it easier to connect the comment with the behavior, and allows the
compliment to influence the student more strongly. Even though there are of course practical limits to how fast
feedback can be given, the general principle is clear: feedback tends to work better when it is timely.
The principle of timely feedback is consistent, incidentally, with one of the principles of operant conditioning
discussed in Chapter 2: reinforcement works best when it follows a to-be-learned operant behavior closely (Skinner,
1957). In this case think of a teacher’s feedback as a form of reinforcement. The analogy is easiest to understand
when the feedback takes the form of praise for something a student did or performed; in operant conditioning
terms, the reinforcing praise then functions like a “reward”. But the analogy to operant conditioning still holds
when feedback is negative—when a teacher criticizes or reprimands a student. In those cases the criticism or
reprimand sometimes functions like what Skinner call an “aversive stimulus” (or mild punishment), shutting down
the behavior criticized. At other times, though, a teacher’s criticism functions in a more paradoxical and unexpected
way: it acts less like an aversive stimulus than like a negative reinforcement. In these cases the criticism does not
shut down a behavior (as true punishment might do), but leads to a less negative state for the student. This
happens, for example, if a student misbehaves in order to gain attention from the teacher or classmates and to
avoid being ignored. If the teacher in this case criticizes the student for the misbehavior, the student may
experience the criticism as a reduction in isolation and as in increase in his importance in the class—in other words,
as reinforcement for misbehavior. So the inappropriate behavior continues, and as teachers we might be tempted to
say that “he is just misbehaving to get attention”. Exhibit 7.2 diagrams this sequence of events.