Feedback for learning from text: What kind and where in the text is most effective?

Abstract

Etextbooks have the affordance of providing immediate feedback for review questions on the content. However, it needs to be clarified what type and placement of feedback is most effective. College and high school students (N = 390) were randomly assigned to receive either correct-answer-only feedback or elaborative feedback either in the middle-and-end of the textbook excerpt or the end only. Elaborative feedback at the end of the text had more accurate posttest scores and more efficient learning (based on time reading per correct answer) than did other conditions. Metacomprehension accuracy, based on the difference between predicted performance and actual performance, did not reliably differ by condition. Neither the perceived difficulty of the text nor the review questions reliably differed based on feedback condition. This study has practical implications for the design of etextbooks provided the findings generalize across disciplines and entire etextbooks.