Delay of Feedback and Retention of Correct and Incorrect Responses

Abstract

Sixty-seven fifth graders studied a text followed by an immediate test (T1) consisting of inference, factual retention, and guess questions, and either received feedback after thirty minutes, after a day, or no feedback. Retesting of half the T1 items was done after a day, the other half after a week. On retesting, subjects were asked to identify their T1 responses. The three types of T1 questions were similarly affected by feedback, while on the postfeedback tests the one-day delay of feedback gave somewhat better results than the thirty minutes of delay. Identification of T1 responses was generally high and was not found to interfere with learning from feedback. In discussing the results, the adequacy of the interference-perseveration hypothesis was questioned.