Response to Assessment Feedback:
The Effects of Grades, Praise, and Source of Information
This experiment involved college students (N = 464) working on an authentic learning task
(writing an essay) under 3 conditions: no feedback, detailed feedback (perceived by participants
to be provided by the course instructor), and detailed feedback (perceived by participants to be
computer generated). Additionally, conditions were crossed with 2 factors of grade (receiving
grade or not) and praise (receiving praise or not). Detailed feedback specific to individual work
was found to be strongly related to student improvement in essay scores, with the influence of
grades and praise more complex. Overall, detailed, descriptive feedback was found to be most
effective when given alone, unaccompanied by grades or praise. The results have implications
for theory and practice of assessment.