How to Give Students Critical Feedback Without Crushing Their Confidence

Once upon a time, when my son was but a wee 5^th grader, my wife and I sat down with him to review his homework assignment – an essay about the early explorers who discovered America. The idea was to give him feedback on how to make his next draft even better.

This might sound like a perfectly innocent thing to do – but when it comes to schoolwork, he’s never much wanted to hear what Mommy and Daddy have to say. He’s exceedingly receptive to feedback if it comes from a teacher, coach, or pretty much anybody else of course. Just not us.

So he err…expressed his displeasure.

It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, so after he calmed down, we asked him about his reaction. As it turns out, something about the way we give him feedback comes across like a put-down (apparently, we have “a tone”). Instead of feeling supported and nudged in a positive way (i.e. “c’mon, you got this”), the message he got was more in the vicinity of “you’re not trying hard enough” or “you’re not good enough.”

Which I imagine would sting a bit.

This led to a bit of a quandary. Do we stop providing feedback and leave this to his teachers at school?

Or do we simply praise him for his efforts and leave it at that?

Or do we sandwich critical-ish bits of feedback between praise of mediocre work?

None of the options felt right. So I wondered…what does the research say? Is there a way to maintain high standards and provide critical feedback to others without crushing their motivation or self-confidence?

The role of trust

Previous work in this area suggests that part of the equation is trust. As in, we are more receptive to feedback when we believe that the feedback-giver is acting in good faith. As opposed to times when we see their actions as an indication that they don’t like us, don’t care about us, or don’t believe in us, and ultimately aren’t fully invested in helping us reach our potential.

Which makes sense, because what’s the point of acting on feedback if it’s just code for “you’re a failure” and “you don’t have what it takes”? Especially if it’s coming from someone who we see as being an expert, whose experience should make them a better judge of whether we can ultimately succeed in this area or not. I mean, why even try if someone like this doesn’t think we have it in us?

Contrast that with feedback which sends the message: “I’m being critical because I have high standards” and “I’m holding you to these standards, even though they are challenging, because I believe that you have the potential to reach that level of excellence.” 

Doesn’t this feel more empowering?

A study with real students and teachers

A team of researchers (Yeager et al., 2014) set out to put this to the test. And not in the lab, but in real classrooms, with real students and their actual teachers.

As part of a 7th grade social studies curriculum module centered around heroes, students were asked to write an essay about a personal hero over the course of several weeks.

Each student’s essay was then reviewed by their teacher, who provided critical feedback of their writing, just as they normally would. Feedback which was a mix of encouragement and suggestions like “Tell a story, give an example” or “This is good but needs more development” and spelling and punctuation errors.

The papers were then returned to the student with an opportunity to resubmit the paper with revisions. 

Note that students did not have to resubmit their essay. It was totally up to them to make that decision.

Two different messages

Forty-four of the students had been secretly selected to participate in the study, who, in addition to their teacher’s feedback, received a hand-written sticky note ¹with one of two messages.

Half of the students received a note which read:

“I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.” (i.e. criticism + high standards + assurance of ability)

The other half received a note which read:

“I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper.” (i.e. criticism only)

“Wise” feedback

There are some important nuances to the study that I’m omitting because they go beyond the scope of this article – and if you have an interest in the larger social issues of equality, opportunity, and bias, you may wish to dig into this a bit more by downloading the paper here.

But overall, about 40% of the students who received the generic note resubmitted their paper.

Whereas about 80% of the students who received the more empowering feedback resubmitted their paper with revisions!

The problem with praising mediocre work

Praising a student is easy. Giving critical feedback is much tougher. 

So sometimes we run the risk of overpraising mediocre performance because we so badly want our students to become confident young musicians, physicists, or swimmers, and are afraid of how they will respond to challenging critiques of their work.

However, there is research (Meyer, 1992) which suggests that offering praise for sub-par performances can sometimes backfire. How so?

Well, praising a student for their mediocre paper or performance could send the message that we don’t believe they’re capable of much more. And that effort isn’t the issue. 

Because if we did think they could do better, wouldn’t we have encouraged them to try harder?

It’s basically like saying “This is not especially good, but I don’t think you could do much better even if you tried, so good job.” Which can be a pretty discouraging message to receive… 

The problem with feedback sandwiches

And then there are the classic “feedback sandwiches” (praise-criticism-praise). But those have their issues too (Von Bergen et al., 2014).

The tl;dr version being, the positives can a) come across as insincere, or b) make it easy to minimize or ignore the criticism.

Takeaways

So, it’s pretty cool to see that there is research which suggests that we don’t have to lower our standards or be insincere in our feedback. And that we can empower and motivate our students (and perhaps also our colleagues in small ensembles or orchestras?) to dig deeper and strive for greater heights, simply by making sure our constructive feedback is accompanied by a reminder of where it is coming from.

That our intention is not to put them down and emphasize just how far they have yet to go. But that it comes from a desire to extend a hand and help them take the next step into their potential, even if they may not (yet) fully appreciate what that might be, or believe they can get there.

References

Meyer, W.-U. (1992). Paradoxical effects of praise and criticism on perceived ability. In W. Stroebe & M. Hewstone (Eds.), European review of social psychology, Vol. 3, pp. 259–283). John Wiley & Sons.

Yeager, D. S., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Brzustoski, P., Master, A., Hessert, W. T., Williams, M. E., & Cohen, G. L. (2014). Breaking the cycle of mistrust: Wise interventions to provide critical feedback across the racial divide. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(2), 804–824.

Von Bergen, C. W., Bressler, S. M., & Campbell, K. (2014). The sandwich feedback method: Not very tasty. Journal of Behavioral Studies in Business, 7, 1–13.