What is the main disadvantage of feedback in learning?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of a feedback system?

Disadvantages: If it takes too long for people to read all the feedback (like 10 or 100 times) then they get annoyed and don't return again. Some people might not be able to understand what the system is telling them. You could get people going around in circles, getting feedback and not having any real effect. Advantages: You only have to set it up once. And it doesn't involve much mental processing for users Can be useful for non-native users of the language. Easily understood by people who've used it before. There's no hard and fast rule about whether or not you should include an auto-feedback system, but there are some suggestions out there. Some include: "Your English is good enough to ask questions here". "You are getting good answers". "Thanks for reading this question". "Thank you for asking!". "Great question!". "Best Answer". "You are really bad at English. Have fun!

What is the main disadvantage of feedback in learning?

It would be a good idea to start out by defining "feedback".

This is a term with a range of meanings, but I'll only concern myself here with what I call "feedback in learning", which is when a teacher, or a student, or a group of students, tries to tell someone something they are doing wrong, and not the way to do it. That's when the term becomes problematic. It's not just an important and useful part of teaching and learning, it's also a major distraction for students. I'll explain.

If you were to sit down with a friend and you were to say: "Let's play tic-tac-toe" and you then played tic-tac-toe with your friend, you'd be able to see immediately when you had done something wrong. You might miss your turn as you were distracted, but you'd know immediately what you'd done. That's called feedback in learning.

A child sitting down at their desk doing a school project may not be able to tell right away that they're doing something wrong. They may be distracted by the task in front of them, and if they aren't very good at what they're doing, then they won't have the self awareness to know they're doing something wrong. We call that "not knowing they're doing wrong".

I think that the "not knowing they're doing wrong" is actually the most common form of feedback, because if you're doing something right, you wouldn't be aware that you were doing it right. It's just part of being human.

Then there is feedback in learning, where the teacher, or the student, or the group of students, says to the student: "that's wrong, try again". That's the teacher telling the student they are wrong. They are in effect telling the student how to do things differently, without saying why. It's a way of directing a student's learning in a particular direction, by telling them what to do differently.

The thing is that the student is already doing something, and the teacher has simply provided an interpretation of the student's performance that they don't like. So they're telling the student that what they've just done is wrong. The whole purpose of telling someone they're doing something wrong is to direct their learning in a particular direction. This is called "feedback in learning".

What are the advantages and disadvantages of positive feedback?

This question came from our website FAQ, and it has been closed because of a problem with one of the comments.

For more information, see the FAQ discussion page. If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.

Your comment on this post has been saved. Please Log in or Sign up to post comments.

Re: ? @John (10 Dec 2025 18:22): This question does not help others by adding helpful information. @John (10 Dec 2025 18:22): You have been warned. I don't think I can make any worthwhile comment without being aware of the entire context of the matter. A quick check in Wikipedia says, "In the negative mode, the loudspeaker provides a negative resistance to the input. At low frequencies, most of the sound that is reflected back into the loudspeaker is absorbed by the resistor; but at high frequencies where the resistance of the resistor is negligible, most of the reflected sound passes through the loudspeaker and thus provides a positive feedback." From that, one could guess that positive feedback tends to reduce low frequency response; while negative feedback tends to increase it.

The advantage of feedback, then, seems to be that it improves the overall performance of the system. That is, if the system gets too loud, then negative feedback ensures a "purer" sound at low frequencies while positive feedback at high frequencies helps reduce distortion.