This project will illuminate neurophysiological processes responsible for children's efficient use of feedback. Children regularly encounter feedback at school and home as they learn new information or acquire new skills. Young learners must extract information from feedback, ignoring irrelevant, false, or misleading feedback, and using helpful feedback to adjust behavior and modify learning strategies. The ability to use feedback efficiently is an element of active, self-regulated learning that is critical to academic success. Understanding such learning in children requires studying how the quality of feedback processing in the brain changes with age through the early school years. By examining how individual cognitive differences affect the development of feedback processing, this project will enable development of effective evidence-based teaching approaches and computer-based learning programs that are tailored for children of different ages and with diverse cognitive profiles. The project will also lead to advances in treatments for children with developmental language disorders whose therapy relies on feedback provision. A broadly representative sample of children will participate in this research, and the study results will be shared with educators via education events held at schools serving low income and underrepresented students.
Feedback processing will be examined in eight- and ten-year-old children who will be followed over three years. In each yearly visit, children will learn new information using corrective feedback while their EEG is recorded. EEG activity will be analyzed to longitudinally investigate changes in children's ability to learn from feedback. The results will improve understanding of how feedback impacts learning, and how this impact changes with age. Working memory measures will also be collected each year and examined in relation to changes in feedback-based learning. The project involves a detailed evaluation of the maturation of feedback processing between 8 and 13 years of age, a period that marks significant developmental changes in self-regulated learning. To increase the representativeness of the participants in the project, transportation will be arranged for interested families with limited mobility.
