Feedback and human learning: Preliminary insights from disengaged students

Background: How to reconnect the disengaged learners has been a major challenge for human learning. Motivating the disengaged learners through traditional interventions has not been effective. Objective: The study aims to examine whether feedback from an external unit would be more persuasive for the disengaged learners. The perception on a lack of learning stems from poor attitude of learning, poor behavior, laziness, and lack of learning ability and attention. Methods: A foreign business community has collaborated with two Bangkok Metropolitan Administration schools since 2016 on creating constructive and indirect feedback. There were 337 students from both schools participated in the survey. 163 students participated in the revised practices while 174 students attended the traditional practices. Results: The results show the gap between the two groups on the effects from constructive and indirect feedback. The disengaged students from the revised pedagogy show that they are attracted to constructive feedback and indirect feedback more. CONCLUSIONS: The findings show that, unlike the traditional paradigm, the disengaged students are perceptive to external feedback. The findings show some consistency with previous studies. Integrating external feedback can attract the attention from the disengaged students which could potentially contribute to human learning.