{"id":270,"date":"2010-12-13T20:23:22","date_gmt":"2010-12-13T20:23:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/?p=270"},"modified":"2010-12-13T20:23:22","modified_gmt":"2010-12-13T20:23:22","slug":"why-assessment-isnt-really-like-central-heating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/?p=270","title":{"rendered":"Why assessment isn&#8217;t really like central heating"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Back in the early days of this blog,\u00a0I muttered about our misunderstanding of the word &#8216;feedback&#8217;\u00a0in the context of\u00a0assessment and gave\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/?p=21#more-21\">examples of positive and negative feedback from everday life<\/a>. I\u00a0talked about the thermostat on a central heating system as an example of negative feedback.<\/p>\n<p>The trouble is, it isn&#8217;t quite that simple. Whereas a thermostat\u00a0acts in a\u00a0predictable way\u00a0to close the gap between the actual and reference temperature (by causing the heating to switch off and on as appropriate),\u00a0 humans respond to feedback interventions in complex (if understandable) ways. For example, Kluger and deNisi point out that if a student does well on an assignment, he or she may &#8216;raise the bar&#8217;\u00a0 i.e. make their target level higher, effectively making the gap that has to be closed larger than would otherwise be the case.<\/p>\n<p>Mind\u00a0you, feedback in other contexts is also more complicated than may initially appear to be the case &#8211; global warming is a case in point!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back in the early days of this blog,\u00a0I muttered about our misunderstanding of the word &#8216;feedback&#8217;\u00a0in the context of\u00a0assessment and gave\u00a0examples of positive and negative feedback from everday life. I\u00a0talked about the thermostat on a central heating system as an &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/?p=270\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[345],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feedback","tag-feedback"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":271,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions\/271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/SallyJordan\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}