The Power of Feedback

John Hattie and Helen Timperley were both at the University of Auckland when this review appeared. Hattie, a New Zealand educational researcher, had spent two decades synthesising the quantitative literature on what raises student achievement, pooling effect sizes across thousands of studies; that programme produced Visible Learning (2009), the meta-analysis of meta-analyses for which he is best known, and the feedback review here draws on the same accumulating database. Helen Timperley, also at Auckland, worked on professional learning and the conditions under which teachers change their practice — her later synthesis of teacher professional development for the New Zealand Ministry of Education is widely cited. Hattie moved to the University of Melbourne in 2011, where he directed the Melbourne Education Research Institute.

"The Power of Feedback" ran in 2007 in the Review of Educational Research, volume 77, issue 1 — a synthesis journal of the American Educational Research Association whose remit is the integrative review rather than the single study, and which is peer reviewed. The article is itself a review: it gathers prior meta-analyses and primary studies of feedback and builds them into a model rather than reporting new data collection. The studies it synthesises span decades before 2007, and the piece is explicit that feedback's measured effect on achievement is large on average but highly variable, which is the problem the model is built to explain.

The model has two parts that the literature has since used heavily. The first asks three questions feedback can answer — where the learner is going, how they are going, and where to next — labelled feed-up, feed-back, and feed-forward. The second sorts feedback into four levels: feedback about the task, about the process, about self-regulation, and about the self as a person, with the last (praise of the person) found to be the least effective. As a secondary, synthesising source it cites its primaries throughout, and they can be chased through its reference list. It sits downstream of the formative-assessment literature in this set: it absorbs the classroom-assessment argument that Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam's pamphlet Inside the Black Box put before teachers and the research review behind it, and it draws on the experimental tradition that Ruth Butler's study of grades against comments belongs to, including the finding that feedback directed at the self can depress performance.

The authors' stake is reputational and professional. Hattie's career is bound to the meta-analytic method, and a review that organises a messy literature into a clean model both demonstrates that method and extends his standing as the field's synthesiser; the article became one of the most cited papers in education, and the Visible Learning franchise that grew alongside it carries books, consultancy, and training programmes. The model collapses a variable literature into three questions and four levels, and the heterogeneity the article itself reports — feedback's effect on achievement ranging from large gains to outright harm — is the reason later researchers returned to it, including a 2020 meta-analysis published as "The Power of Feedback Revisited".