Motivational feedback can provide engagement. A friendly personalized "Welcome!" the moment you log in to a course helps you feel like the system knows you are there. A "Thank You!" message when you turn in an assignment provides a polite and and motivating response. Such feedback is not related directly to learning or to helping the learners' sense of understanding, remembering or performing the ideas to be learned, but it may help with motivation and a sense of presence.

"Check your answer," "please rate the usefulness of this page," "really good comment!" "your grade: 3.5," "tell the group your opinion" and "watch this video about drinking and driving" are all different kinds of feedback. Here are some approaches to tie feedback to theories of learning:

• Behaviorism: positive and negative reinforcers.
  Behaviorists would engineer feedback in the form of positive and negative reinforcers for learner behaviors, with the goal of encouraging desired behavior and discouraging undesired behavior. Software which punishes users for wrong answers and rewards for right answers is one example.
• Cognition: check if knowledge was received, check for schema revision.
  Educators who have particular facts and ideas they are trying to teach provide feedback as to whether learners are "getting it right."
• Social & Situational: observe consequences to models.
  Social learning feedback can take the form of learners having the opportunity to observe others (real or video or cartoon etc.) modeling behavior and experiencing consequences. This kind of feedback helps learners decide whether or not to engage in such behaviors themselves.
• Constructivism: check what knowledge was constructed.
  Constructivists want to understand what kind of knowledge constructions are happening within the learner, even though there is no emphasis on right or wrong.
• Collaborative Learning: compare notes with other learners.
  Collaborative learners float ideas to others and gauge their reactions, and listen to what others are thinking in order to compare it to their own ideas. Sometimes peer review can be set up to encourage further thinking.