About Feedback

This week's reading for ED256, the article "Parallel prototyping leads to better design results, more divergence, and increased self-efficacy" (Dow et al, 2010) discusses about the importance of proper timing of feedback for novice designers. By using technological devices and measurement such as computers, internet, and click-through data, etc, the authors argue that, based on their deliberate manipulation of the frequency and time of giving feedback for people designing graphic Web advertisements, people receiving feedback on multiple prototypes in parallel have higher self-efficacy and more innovation and diversity shown both through their creation process and in their final design product compared with people with serial feedback.

This article is really interesting and informative to read. Besides the research findings, it demonstrates in a fairly detailed way about the process of research design, implementation, analysis, and discussion of the results. More importantly, it shows another example of utilizing modern technology not only to motivate learners to test their talent and share it with others, but also to effectively evaluate public acceptance and appreciation of the learners' work. However, what resonates most with my research interest in second/ foreign language education is the theme of this article: feedback and its timing.

The role of feedback, more commonly known as "error correction" and "positive comments", has been one of the most controversial topics in the history of foreign language teaching as well as second language acquisition research. Though feedback is considered in general a fundamental principle of learning, the pedagogical pendulum has swung back and forth between positive and negative perceptions about the need and effect of feedback (Brandl, 2008, p143). As making errors is part of any learning process, and teachers are constantly facing with the dilemma and decision about how to deal with errors and how and when to provide feedback, more concrete evidence is thus much needed to help answer these questions. Therefore, I think this article about feedback in prototyping sheds new light on the feedback issue in language education and gives me the hope of finding more comparable, convincing, and hence valuable data to support teachers' decision-making in language classrooms as well as the design of any related language education programs provided in either real or virtual world.