Feedback is essential for student learning, but grading student performance means combining accuracy and empathy while understanding that every student has their own needs. How can you personalise your approach to marking while maintaining consistency across the class?
Here are some tips for providing feedback.
Give students an accurate assessment of their performance
This might seem like a given, but remarkably, many teachers fail to provide adequate, clear-eyed assessments of student performance. There are a number of reasons why this occurs, including:
- The teacher is too focused on strategies to improve
- The teacher does not wish to ‘coddle’ students by telling them they are doing well / praising them
- The teacher doesn’t wish to ‘dishearten’ their students by telling them they aren’t performing to standard
However, evidence suggests that providing feedback on performance is key to helping students improve, achieve and better themselves.
Giving effective feedback to students
When providing feedback to your students, you can draw from these four options:
- Providing affirmation on things they did well
- Correcting issues by directing the student towards the solution
- Walking students through a successful methodology or process
- Showing students how they can critique their own work and better judge personal performance.
Providing affirmation (not praise)
When providing feedback to your students it’s essential that positive feedback affirms what they did well, rather than praises the student. The point of difference between these two options can be defined as:
- Praise heaps the success of the person. “You’re very smart, well done.”
- Affirmation focuses on the quality of the work done. “This is the correct answer. Well done.”
Correcting issues and directing towards solutions
When providing feedback to your students it’s not enough to simply say when something is wrong.
Mistakes are part of the learning experience
It’s essential for students to understand that making mistakes is part of learning. For students to learn, they must be directed to the right answer. Correct, then direct.
As a teacher, how you achieve this will largely be contextual to the activity, subject and student.
Focus on single skills or questions
When feedback is too broad it can be hard for students to distinguish the relevance of the feedback. Try to focus on a particular element of the essay and provide clear, concise recommendations.
Sometimes, particularly with simple questions, the direction will be a correction. For more complex activities, you may want to show your students a particular methodology or process.
Walking students through a methodology or process
For more complex tasks it is better to show a student how to reach an answer rather than just simply correct the answer.
- Show them a step-by-step process
- Give them guidance in how to reference source material
- Provide learning guidance using this feedback model to empower the student.
Essentially you want to connect the student first to:
- What they did, and
- Why it produced that result
And then:
- What they can do, and
- How that leads to an improved result.
While walking students through methodology and process can be time-consuming, it’s essential for providing quality feedback that will impact the student’s capacity to learn and move forward. Educators can address small groups or even the whole class if it is valuable to multiple students, but it’s important to touch base with students on particular processes that might help them learn.
Showing students how to critique their own work
Unlocking a student’s potential to critique their own work requires first that the student be capable of processing taught methodologies.
Coaching students to evaluate their own work means the student must be able to identify where they need to improve and gain insight from that identification.
It’s an important life skill but teachers shouldn’t pressure every student to achieve this level of learning. After all, every student is different and learns at their own pace. However, you can guide them by asking questions like:
- What is the ideal answer to this question?
- What aspects of this answer did you answer correctly?
- Which aspects need work?
For students who are responsive to ‘correct and direct’ feedback, self-critique can be an important step.
Develop strategies for your students to perform better
Feedback is important for any student. It’s also an important tool in building trust between teachers and students. Use the above guide to improve your farming and feedback and you’ll find students improve faster and are more engaged with the learning materials.
Feedback is any response regarding a student’s performance or behavior. It can be verbal, written or gestural. The purpose of feedback in the assessment and learning process is to improve a student’s performance - not put a damper on it. It is essential that the process of providing feedback is a positive, or at least a neutral, learning experience for the student. Negative feedback can discourage student effort and achievement. Instructors have the distinct responsibility to nurture a student’s learning and to provide feedback in such a manner that the student does not leave the classroom feeling defeated.
Characteristics of Effective Feedback
Educative in Nature
Providing feedback means giving students an explanation of what they are doing correctly AND incorrectly, with the focus of the feedback on what the students is doing right. It is most productive to a student’s learning when they are provided with an explanation as to what is accurate and inaccurate about their work. One technique is to use the concept of a “feedback sandwich” to guide your feedback: Compliment, Correct, Compliment.
Given In a Timely Manner
When student feedback is given immediately after showing proof of learning, the student responds and remembers the experience about what is being learned more positively. If we wait too long to give feedback, the student might not connect the feedback with the learning moment.
Sensitive to the Individual Needs of the Student
It is vital that we take into consideration each individual when giving student feedback. Our classrooms are full of diverse learners. Some students need to be nudged to achieve at a higher level and other needs to be handled gently so as not to discourage learning and damage self-esteem.
Answers the 4 Questions
Studies of effective teaching and learning (Dinham, 2002, 2007a; 2007b) have shown that learners want to know where they stand in regards to their work. Providing answers to the following four questions on a regular basis will help provide quality student feedback.
- What can the student do?
- What can’t the student do?
- How does the student’s work compare with that of others?
- How can the student do better?
Provides a Model or Example
Communicate with your students the purpose for an assessment and/or student feedback. Demonstrate to students what you are looking for by giving them an example of what an A+ paper looks like. Provide a contrast of what a C- paper looks like. This is especially important at the upper learning levels.
Suggestions for Effective and Efficient Grading Feedback
The most effective feedback is focused, clear, and considers motivation and learning, not justifying a grade or on copyediting. Below are suggested strategies for providing efficient & effective student feedback.
- Use comments to teach rather than to justify the grade, focusing on what you’d most like students to address in future work. Link your comments and feedback to the goals for an assignment.
- Plan early opportunities for students to get feedback on ways of thinking, writing, or problem solving that they will need later, so that they don’t develop or repeat common errors. In-class active or collaborative learning exercises can be good moments to provide formative feedback in class, when students are practicing new skills or learning new concepts.
- Avoid over-commenting or “picking apart” students’ work.
- In your final comments, ask questions that will guide further inquiry by students.
- Think about alternatives to writing comments on every individual student’s work. Provide feedback to the whole class orally and/or in a shared written document, or have the class read sample student work together to look for common themes or apply evaluation criteria.
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