Is this feedback loop positive or negative?

Thomas F. Shipley, Temple University

Kim Kastens, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

Courtney Sheckler, Temple University

Alexandra Davatzes, Temple University

Initial Publication Date: July 14, 2025

Summary

The Feedback Loop Sorting activity is designed to capture student understanding of feedback loops as a general causal pattern that can occur in various contexts throughout nature and in human-made systems. Students are presented with 12 narratives that represent positive feedback (reinforcing) loops, negative feedback (balancing) loops, and non-feedback loops with examples of all three types having desirable or undesirable outcomes. Students sort the narratives into a 3 x 2 matrix (3 loop types x 2 outcome types) or, if using the activity as a part of an online class, to choose from a multiple-choice selection of responses that contain all possible combinations of loop type and outcome type. The goal of the activity is to have students be able to distinguish between positive and negative feedback loops and desirable and undesirable outcomes. Successful sorting requires students to identify loops in narratives about different topics with dissimilar narrative structures.

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Context

Audience

This activity is designed to be used in any course that encounters feedback loops within the course content. The narratives are designed to draw on knowledge of common causal processes, not specialized processes, so that students across scientific disciplines will be able to complete the activity.

Skills and concepts that students must have mastered

Students should have had an introduction to both positive and negative feedback loops.

How the activity is situated in the course

This activity can be used as a learning activity or an assessment. The paper and pencil version is well suited for use as a small-group learning activity, because discourse as students strive to agree on a placement for each narrative in the matrix helps them build a more robust understanding.

If students have been exposed to only one or two specific feedback loops, this activity could be used to support students seeing feedback loops as a generalizable system that transcends the specific examples they may have encountered in a course. The activity can be used as an assessment to gauge student understanding of feedback loops either before or after instruction.

Goals

Content/concepts goals for this activity

  • Students should be able to unravel the sequence of causal links that create a positive or negative feedback loop.
  • Students should understand that a feedback loop is a system of causal influences that can occur in a wide range of causal systems that include both natural and social causes.
  • Students should be able to recognize the likely presence of a feedback loop in a description of a phenomenon that is underlain by a feedback loop, even when the term "feedback loop" is not used.
  • Students should be able to discriminate the type of feedback loop (positive versus negative) in a narrative independently from the type of outcome (desirable versus undesirable).

Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity

  • Application of knowledge: Students need to be able to recognize the information from the narrative and apply prior knowledge to the given narrative.
  • Text analysis: Students will be reading text about a wide range of topics and analyzing the text for significant underlying patterns and processes that are not explicitly named.
  • Development of runnable mental models: To distinguish between positive and negative feedback systems students can practice tracing causal influences as they flow through the system to mentally simulate how a system will evolve over time.

Skills goals for this activity

  • For the working in groups variant, students will practice making an oral argument that observed behavior (as recounted in narrative) is or is not compatible with the three competing causal models.

Description and Teaching Materials

In this activity, students read 12 short narratives, some of which describe a feedback loop. Students sort these narratives into a matrix where the columns convey whether the outcome of a system (feedback loop or not), taken in its entirety, is desirable or undesirable. The rows of the matrix convey whether a feedback loop is positive or negative, or not a loop. This can be done alone or as a group. The sorting can be a physical sort into piles within a matrix, or indicating where each item belongs in the matrix using multiple choice answers.

Attached are the documents needed to complete this activity. The narratives as well as a key to their correct sorting are attached separately. We have provided a template for implementing this activity in an online class. The document containing the sorted narratives can be edited to be used as a blank sorting matrix.

Teaching Notes and Tips

The activity is designed to support seeing feedback loops as similar in their causal structure despite differences in surface features. Students first learning about feedback loops commonly conflate desirable and undesirable outcomes with positive and negative feedback types. While feedback loop type is an objective property of a system, the desirability of outcomes can vary depending on the observer. Students will not always agree upon the desirability of an outcome, and we have found it valuable, when time allows, to follow up students' initial sorting with small group discussions of differences in how students in the group sorted the items.


Assessment

The best way to determine if students have met the goals of this activity is to check their answers and see what confusions may be evident and require additional pedagogy.

References and Resources

This activity is a part of a resource collection "Fostering Feedback Loop Thinking," which contains additional activities and information about feedback loops.