Motivation 

This article explores how the brain processes feedback during learning, offering insights that complement more common educational theories about learning from feedback from cognitive, behaviorist, sociocultural, and constructivist approaches.

Feedback-Based Learning in Education and Neuroscience

Whether for academic achievement, professional development, or lifelong learning, learning from feedback is essential. As any educator (or parent or mentor or friend or …) knows, providing feedback does not ensure that someone will learn from it. For this reason, much research has studied the efficacy of different factors and types of feedback and whether that efficacy differs based on learners’ characteristics (e.g., this book chapter summary discusses factors related to education technology). These variables are studied from many different perspectives, including cognitivism, behaviorism, socioculturalism, and constructivism. However, the brain mechanisms and neural correlates of feedback processing have rarely been part of our understanding of how people learn from feedback.

This systematic literature review collects papers that bridge the educational and neuroscience research on learning from feedback. Only papers with both functional neuroimaging data and experimental behavioral data were included, connecting traditional educational research methods with those that show the brain mechanisms at play. The results show how brain development affects the processing of feedback and how situational, social, and emotional factors affect learning from feedback.