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Giving Feedback

What is Feedback?

Feedback defines for students what their teacher thinks is important for a topic or a subject. At its best, feedback should:

• guide both teachers and students
• be a core part of teaching and learning, not an add-on ritual
• focus around course and topic learning outcomes
• guide students to become independent learners and their own critics
• account for a developmental approach for achievement in a discipline.

Feedback ought to aim at enabling students to improve their future efforts. However, one often gets the impression that students leave university making many of the same errors that they made when they entered. An explanation for this common phenomenon could be that:

• Assessors' feedback is little more than editing and does not give students a clear message about what they must do to improve future submissions.
• Students don't read or take the advice that is given and are not required to do so.

Purposes

Feedback is needed by:

• teachers to adapt and adjust teaching to accommodate learning needs
• students to adapt and adjust their learning strategies.

Principles to guide your practice

Feedback should be..

• Constructive
  so that students feel encouraged and motivated to improve their practice
• Timely
  so that students can use it for subsequent learning and work to be submitted
• Prompt
  so that students can recall what they did and thought at the time
• Supportive of learning
  should be linked to a clear statement of orderly progression of learning so that students have clear indications of how to improve their performance
• Focused
  on achievement, not effort. The work should be assessed, not the student
• Specific to the learning outcomes
  so that assessment is clearly linked to learning
• Consequential
  so that it engages students and they are required to attend to feedback, removing the need for continually giving the same student the same advice
• Fostering of independence
  so that it leads students to being capable of assessing their own work
• Efficient
  for staff to do.

Types of Feedback

• Informal
  worked examples (e.g. verbal feedback in class, personal consultation)
• Formal
  in writing (e.g. checklists, written commentary, generic exemplars)
• Direct
  to individual student (either in written form or in consultation)
• Indirect
  to whole class (e.g. generic exemplars)
• Formative
  given during the run of the topic, enabling risk taking and adjustment prior to final submission
• Summative
  given at the end of a topic,with the purpose of letting students know what they have achieved.

Difficulties Associated with Giving and Getting Feedback

Academic Concerns:

• Time-consuming
  Giving useful feedback can be very time consuming for academics and has limited value if students don't read it or act on it.
• Repetitive
  It is not uncommon to correct the same common errors on a particular student's work and on most students' work with little change occurring over time in students' performances.
• Too late
  Few assessment tasks enable teachers to get timely feedback to adjust either content or teaching strategies to focus on actual learning needs.
  

Student Concerns:

• Too late
  Often occurs when a subject/topic is over and there is little that can be done to remedy misunderstanding. Students are rarely required to act upon it.
• No explanation
  Students report that they are often left not knowing what they have done well, what they need to change and why they have achieved the grade they have. It is often students who don't do well who get feedback and good students receive little more than 'excellent' on their work without gaining an insight into what they have done well and what they could do to enhance their performance.
• "One-off"
  Many assessment tasks are 'one-off' and for real grades. Students don't get the opportunity to take the advice given. There is little room for risk taking, experimentation and practice.
• Limited value
  Much feedback is either editing of grammar or spelling, or cliché (e.g."More", "Good", "What's this?", etc.) Much feedback does not actually give the student a sense of what they might do to improve their learning or the products of their learning.
• Not progressive
  Does not give students a sense of what they have achieved in progressing towards a goal and what they have yet to achieve.

Feedback Strategies

Providing Feedback to Large Groups

1. Lectures
   Lectures are a source of quick formative assessment to ascertain for yourself that students are understanding correctly. Feedback given in this manner can be used to guide future teaching and to give a class some indication of their progress thus far.

   Give students a brief writing task such as those suggested below. The suggestions are linked to pages you can download and use in your classes. Students' contributions can be anonymous or work required that is not graded. Collect and briefly review students' responses before the next lecture. If your class is very large, analyse a random percentage of them.

• The One Minute Paper
  Students write for one minute on what their understanding is of the main idea of the lecture or the most intriguing point and one or two questions that remain uppermost in their mind.
• The Five Main Points
  Some lecturers have found that they made 120 main points according to their students who have been unable to distinguish anecdote from example from the concepts.
• Concept Map
  Students are given a few minutes to illustrate the relationship between ideas or to fill in a pre-drawn concept map with the links provided, but the concepts removed.
• Applications Card
  Students brainstorm some of the ideas discussed and then select two and illustrate ways that these ideas may be applied to everyday life.
• The Muddiest Point
  Students write for one minute the idea that is least clear to them at that moment

  Follow up to Lecture Feedback

  1. Hand out an A4 sheet to the entire class with
     (i) examples of appropriate responses and
     (ii) examples of some misconceptions with some explanations about why they were not correct and
     (iii) resources for follow-up study to correct the misconception.
  2. Use the first 5 minutes of the lecture to give the students a verbal response around what was appropriate and what was misconceived.
  3. While students come in to the next lecture and get settled, put an overhead up that outlines the main idea of the last lecture, corrects misconceptions, answers questions and suggests further reading/activities.
  4. Base your next lecture around students' learning needs.
     
• Assessment Profiles
  These are ideal answers with which students can compare their answers. Ideally, students should be required to correct their work as necessary making observations as to where and why they went wrong.
  
• Generic feedback
  An A4 typed page of generic feedback, that is common for all students, and that briefly describes the characteristics of papers that achieved each grade can be issued after a final paper. This enables students to see how their learning product fitted into a scope of possible achievements. It provides students answers and ideas to provide clarification of misconceptions on a broad scale, rather than a private written/verbal consultation with individual students which loses the comparison with peer responses element.
  

Value of using these strategies:

• They are low cost in terms of time taken by the teacher and the student.
• They are learning focused and can be used to increase students' meta cognitive awareness.
• Teachers get an instant insight into how students are interpreting lecture content and have an opportunity to clear up misconceptions.
• Students receive quick feedback on their perceptions and interpretations while they are constructing its meaning.
• Students can be creative and take risks because it is not for grades.
• Students are actively engaged in the lecture.

Providing Feedback to Individuals

1. Check-lists
   Students conduct self-evaluation of a body of work prior to submission to check that particular areas or issues have been covered. Students could then refine work as necessary
   
2. Selecting
   Students are required to request the nature of feedback required from the teacher as stipulated in a request form. The teacher then provides the specific feedback in a particular format or addresses particular issues. Ideally this should be an element of formative assessment as it would have little value if this was at the end of a particular topic.

Feedback in practice

An academic who questioned the value of his diligent editing of students' texts especially when assignments lingered in his office for over a year because student failed to collect them. He paid a graduate student to survey his undergraduate students and found that students did not read what he had written on their assignments and particularly did not use his comments as a reference for the next assignment.

His solution was:

On the first assignment

1. Resist writing all over the assignment.
Note a particular type of error once, and indicate that the student needs to look for other potential errors and find out a way to correct them, for example:

• poor spelling
  advise them to use a spell checker etc.
• poor grammar
  direct them to advice or use a computer program
• poor structure and design
  direct them to courses or books on essay writing poor conceptualizing
  redirect them to texts
• lower level cognitive achievement e.g. simple retelling of the text;
  describe it and explain what you are looking for instead.

2. Give students only three or four pieces of advice about changes/improvements.

3. Expect the advice to be attended to for subsequent paper(s).

4. Make the grade assigned to the subsequent paper contingent upon students' clear and specific indication about how they had acted upon the prior advice.

This teacher required that the first essay and his feedback be returned with the subsequent assignment with a single page explanation of the ways in which they had acted on the advice provided in the prior assignment.

In this case, the final paper his students submitted merely received a grade with no written comments. His rationale for this was largely based on an assumption that students will not have the opportunity to act on advice at the end of a topic.

This type of approach to feedback:

• reduces the 'one-off' nature of most assignment demands
• makes students take responsibility for their own learning
• increases the value added nature of your teaching (you can indicate improvements made for all students)
• increases the opportunity for high achieving students as well as low achieving students to get constructive feedback
• helps to increase students' meta cognitive awareness
• reduces the hoop jumping approach to assessment and the repetitive nature of assignment writing and giving feedback.