Types of Feedback
Psychology research has identified several different types of feedback, including outcome feedback (OFB), cognitive feedback (CFB), task properties feedback (TPF), and explanatory feedback (EFB) (Balzer et al. 1989; Hammond et al. 1973; Kluger and DeNisi 1996; Todd and Hammond 1965).4 The general finding is that EFB (i.e., step-by-step feedback regarding why a particular answer was correct) is superior to OFB (i.e., feedback regarding the correct answers) because EFB allows for a more simplified and structured learning process, which in turn leads to greater improvements in judgment performance (Balzer et al. 1989; Bonner and Walker 1994). Despite the advantages of EFB, Bonner and Walker (1994) note that providing EFB may not be feasible in many real-life situations. For example, audit seniors are often too busy to provide EFB to junior auditors (Earley 2001).5 OFB, in contrast, reduces (and often eliminates) the downstream time requirement associated with one-on-one feedback. Further, OFB may be the only type of feedback available, especially when conditions involve time constraints (Bonner and Walker 1994). Since OFB is both more feasible to provide in real-life settings and naturally related to accounting information, we focus on gaining a better understanding of OFB in this study. In particular, we focus on the ability of numeric OFB to improve performance in a relatively complex forecasting task.