Immediate Versus Delayed Feedback on Learning: Do People’s Instincts Really Conflict With Reality?

Abstract

Researchers have held differing views on the effects of feedback timing for decades. A closer reading of the timing of feedback literature that favored delayed feedback revealed that this conclusion may have been reached prematurely, because the results might have been confounded by the time interval between feedback and a posttest. This study differs from previous feedback timing studies in three distinct ways: First, this study addressed the limitations of previous studies by holding time interval between the feedback (either immediate or delayed) and the posttest constant. Second, this study included various types of knowledge and investigated the interaction between feedback timing and different knowledge types. Third, most studies that investigate the comparative effectiveness of immediate and delayed feedback on written assignments were conducted in the STEM fields, whereas few studies can be found in the second language learning field. Results revealed that the immediate feedback condition significantly outperformed the delayed feedback condition on conceptual knowledge learning, however, no difference between the two conditions was found on situational knowledge learning.