Blissful Ignorance? A Natural Experiment on The Effect of Feedback on Students' Performance

We present a theoretical framework and empirical strategy to measure whether and how providing university students with feedback on their own past exam performance affects their future exam performance. Our identification strategy exploits a natural experiment in a leading UK university where different departments have historically different rules on the provision of feedback to their students. Our theoretical framework makes precise that if feedback provides students with a signal of their marginal return to effort in generating test scores, then the effect of feedback depends on the balance of standard substitution and income effects, and on whether students over or under estimate the return to their effort. Empirically, we find the provision of feedback has a positive effect on student’s subsequent test scores: the mean impact corresponds to 13% of a standard deviation in test scores. The impact of feedback is stronger for more able students and for students who have less information to start with, while no students appear to be discouraged by feedback. Our findings add to a growing literature on feedback in organizations more generally, and specifically in this setting the results suggest that the provision of feedback might be a cost-effective means to increase students’ exam performance.