Feed Back as a Teaching Tool: Its Impact on the Motivation of Higher Education Students

The implementation of newteaching methodologies (transformative learning, flipped classroom, learn-by-teaching, peer feedback learning, problem-based learning and the like) transform students into the protagonists of their own learning (student-centered learning) and thus requires a greater degree of involvement. To achieve such a commitment, and thus ensure the effectiveness of these methodologies, the student must be motivated. One of the pedagogical resources available to the teacher to influence motivation is feedback. Well-executed feedback provides students with information about their performance that should be useful, either so that they can detect areas for improvement or focus on them, or that they become aware of their strengths and can reinforce and develop them. In the academic field, the difficulty in providing quality feedback is not so much because of the capacity (knowledge and skills) of the teacher, but because of the routine nature that it can represent. It is worrying that some teachers may consider feedback as a tedious administrative task, and not as a true pedagogical tool. This research therefore aims to provide data to determine to what extent feedback influences student motivation and thus academic performance. To carry out the experiment, a sample of 256 undergraduates following marketing and physical education degree courses was employed. They were selected by probabilistic sampling stratified by courses and gender. The participants were asked to carry out a task that they had to repeat in three different phases. The first phase was a training session so they could calibrate the characteristics of the task. In the second, the sample was divided into four groups who were asked to execute the task in different ways: one group received exact information; another, incorrect information; the third did not receive any type of information; and messages of encouragement were transmitted to the fourth group. Finally, in the third phase, they all repeated the same task without any type of information in order to observe the results obtained and the incidence of feedback. The resulting data show that there is a direct relationship between the information provided and the level of satisfaction obtained after completing the task. Such satisfaction also affects the perception that students may have about the task performed in terms of being fun/boring or the predisposition they show to repeat the task. All these concepts are closely linked t