Brain-based cognitive processes that underlie feedback between adult students and instructors

Feedback is ranked among the top 5 to 10 highest influences on academic achievement. Recent advances in neurosciences enable understanding feedback in post-secondary settings as a reciprocal process that is mediated by brain-based cognitive processes common to both students and instructors. We describe three of these processes. The first process explains how feedback often involves tacit emotional responses. The second process highlights how prior experiences with feedback influence current experience. The last process relates to the development of personal mental models of feedback. We offer a set of implications for best practices based on these cognitive processes shared by students and instructors