Abstract
This paper introduces an empirical study that examines how teachers evaluate pupils’ responses. The study draws on research undertaken at four secondary schools in the Czech Republic. It transpires that feedback has a stable position in the structure of communication; however, it is used only to verify pupils’ responses and not to elaborate them. An important feature of feedback is its implicitness and near-zero content value resulting from the teachers’ preferences to avoid explicit evaluative comments. This type of feedback is not in accordance with the concepts of dialogical education that currently dominate the field of the theory of educational communication.
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Notes
The research is funded by the Czech Science Foundation (GACR, GA406/09/0752).
Each class was recorded on two video cameras. One was positioned at the front and recorded the teacher as well as all their movements in the classroom. The second camera was at the back, which helped us to reconstruct pupil’s behaviour.
The teachers were repeatedly reassured that the recordings were intended for research purposes only, that they would only be passed on as transcriptions where the teachers’ names would be changed. Also, we had to guarantee that recordings would be handed over solely to them and not to anybody else (e.g. to the directors of the schools).
With the exception of dressing up.
T stands for teacher, P for pupil, PP for pupils. Italics highlights those passages that we want to emphasize. Time data (e.g. 1s) refer to delays in communication. Bracketed text (slowly) indicates that the teacher raised his/her voice, slowed down the pace of speech, or used non-verbal communication.
It is important to note that we are not talking about a situation where the teacher approves the response and asks a new question. What we have in mind are only those types of questions which stem from the pupil response just given.
Hattie and Timperley (2007) call this type of feedback personal feedback and express strong doubts about its effectiveness.
They are placed at the very end so as to close the whole structure.
The original quotation was changed in translation because of its meaning. In the original quotation pupils have a problem with declension, which is a system of grammatically-determined modifications to nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals in the Czech language. There is a system of seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative and instrumental) in Czech.
The ratio is 25 % for open questions in our research, 18 % for pseudo-open questions, and 57 % for closed questions.
Even though Czech pedagogical tradition has developed a sophisticated way of working with mistakes (e.g. Kulič 1971) our data doesn’t allow us to work with these theories on an empirical material.
The fact that something is designated as “modern“or “progressive“doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a change for the better (Lloyd 1976). By “liberal-progressive”, teachers usually imagine less authoritarian behaviour on the part of the teacher, the disappearance of punishments, and a more friendly approach to pupils. However, since no change of educational model has officially been articulated, “democratic” or “liberal” teaching is therefore a folk version of progressive pedagogy. Similarly, constructivism is also taken to be a desirable ideology, but it is neither theoretically described nor empirically examined.
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Šeďová, K., Švaříček, R. Feedback in educational communication in Czech secondary schools. Educ Asse Eval Acc 24, 239–261 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-012-9144-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11092-012-9144-8