The Power of Teachers’ Constructive Feedback and How It Is Interpreted by Students with Reference to Janzour Secondary Schools

Abstract

Feedback is one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement, but this impact can be either positive or negative. Giving constructive feedback to students can be very helpful because they will think of their teacher’s feedback as a motive for keeping up the good work. Moreover, students will think of their teacher’s feedback thoroughly and try to adjust their work to come up with a better product. On the other hand, receiving negative feedback is devastating most of the times. Calling a student “Stupid” or telling him/her “Your answer is wrong, you can’t do anything right,” can cause serious psychological damages. The student will feel that it makes no sense to edit his/her work or even try to accomplish anything in the future. Therefore, this research aims to find out how and why secondary school teachers provide feedback and how students interpret their teachers’ feedback. It sought to identify major influences that could have effects on teaching and learning process and students’ achievements. The research sample consists of 65 male and female students and 7 male and female teachers from 3 secondary public schools in Libya. The different schools in this study were chosen randomly using stratified random sampling