A Study of Analyzing Oral and Written Feedback in Promoting Learning of Mathematics

Abstract

"Feedback is conceptualized as information provided by an agent (e.g., teacher, peer, book, 
parent, self, experience) regarding aspects of one‘s performance or understanding."
(Timperley and Hattie, 2007) 

One of the major banes in Teaching and Learning of Mathematics lies in the the crude methods 
of assessment that encourage the perception of mathematics as mechanical computation (NCF 
2005). Every classroom of a school follows the same routine of teaching where the teacher gives 
instructions, provide work to do and then check it in their own way. There is only one type of 
checking which our teacher, generally, follows in the classroom. This checking is conducted in 
the form of marking ticks for correct solutions and crosses for incorrect solutions. But the 
assessment of having right and wrong is not beneficial for students; the assessment should be 
followed with the feedback, which gives detailed information to students about concepts, 
misconception which led to the wrong answer and so on.  
Rama Prasad (1983) defined feedback as information about the gap between the actual level and 
the desired level of performance, which in turn leads to corrective action to minimise the gap. 
The motive behind the feedback is to make the child aware of the desired goal or action that is 
demanded or the answers of the questions like Where am I going What is my goal? How am I 
going? Where to next? etc. Effective feedback provides the learner with two types of information: 
verification and elaboration. Verification is defined as the simple judgment of whether or not an 
answer is correct, and elaboration is the informational aspect of the message, providing relevant 
cues to guide the learner towards a correct answer.  
In this article, the author is attempting to find out whether the feedback can be used to facilitate 
the teaching-learning process of mathematics or not For this, she conducted an experimental 
study. The focus of this study is to find out whether the oral and written feedback make any 
difference in the performance of students if it is provided after the tasks they had formed in their 
classes. This study was conducted to see the effect of enhanced feedback versus traditional 
feedback. Apart from this, she also tries to discuss the answers to the following questions:

 What is the feedback? 
 What are the different methods of giving feedback? 
 Does feedback facilitate meaningful learning in mathematics?  
The objective is that the process of seeking the answers to these questions will necessarily 
involve a significant discussion on the effectiveness of feedback in the teaching-learning process 
of mathematics.