Providing Feedback
Feedback is a key component of the assessment process. For students to improve their skills and academic performance, they need to receive effective feedback and use it to improve their subsequent work.
Take a moment to think about feedback from an instructor, supervisor, or mentor that has helped you deepen your knowledge or strengthen a skill. How was their feedback delivered? Was their feedback provided periodically throughout the course of an assignment or on a final product? How did you use their feedback in subsequent work?
In this section, we take a look at the components of effective feedback to help you deliver feedback that can lead to student improvement.
elements of effective feedback
Effective feedback informs students of how to direct their efforts to improve their mastery of a concept or skill. To achieve this, the authors of聽聽suggest that feedback should communicate the following to students:
These three pieces of information help students identify where they are currently at in their learning process and where they should direct future efforts. Effective feedback contains both positive reinforcement and critique framed through a growth mindset.
In addition to the components explained above, feedback should be aligned with course goals, targeted, and timely. Aligning feedback to course objectives (and being transparent about this alignment) will help students understand the reasoning behind your suggestions for improvement. For example, if it is an objective for students to be able to connect a historical text to a modern event, then your feedback should be framed around how students succeeded at meeting this objective and how they can improve. Helpful feedback is targeted, meaning that it prioritizes the aspects of an assignment that students most need to focus on鈥攃hoose just 2-3 areas of student performance to highlight in your feedback (this will also save you time!). Finally, feedback is most useful when it is provided soon after the completion of an assignment and when there will be opportunities to demonstrate growth. Feedback provided on an outline will help students improve their paper drafts, but feedback on an essay due at the end of a semester has limited ability to influence future student performance. When feedback (or feedforward) is provided to students on works in-progress it is termed 鈥渇orward-looking鈥, whereas feedback on final products is termed 鈥渂ackward-looking鈥. Unless it鈥檚 required by the primary instructor of your course, we don鈥檛 recommend that TAs spend time giving feedback on end of semester products.
types of feedback
Here, we review categories of feedback that can be used together to clearly communicate how students can improve future work (Leibold and Schwarz, 2015):
Corrective feedback identifies the assignment expectations that students have and have not met (make sure that you鈥檝e made these expectations clear before the students begin an assignment; see below for a discussion of rubrics).
Epistemic (relating to knowledge) feedback encourages students to push their understanding of a concept to the next level, asking students to clarify a particular point or to more comprehensively explore an idea.
Suggestive feedback provides advice for how students might address either corrective or epistemic feedback. Epistemic and suggestive feedback are particularly useful when used together, where instructors can highlight an area that deserves further exploration and give advice on how to go about this exploration.
feedback modality
Feedback is perhaps most commonly provided to students as written notes. However, you can consider alternative forms of feedback that might save you time, be more personal, and help you deliver the intended intonation to students:
Video/Audio feedback. You might find that you can more quickly explain your ideas than write them out. This kind of feedback can be particularly helpful if you have few other opportunities to talk to your students individually, such as in large or online classes.
1:1 or small group meetings. Meetings allow students to ask questions about your feedback in the moment. This can enhance student agency by turning feedback from something that is passively received into a conversation. Holding small group meetings can give students opportunities to interact and learn from each other while saving time. You can also ask students about the feedback itself and ask them to plan how they will implement it.
Rubrics as feedback. Providing students with rubrics will make the feedback process easier for you and the assignment more transparent to students. Students should know exactly what is expected of them before they begin an assignment and why. Use your rubrics to lay out details of an assignment and connect them back to larger course objectives. You can also co-construct rubrics with your students to increase agency and to get them involved in thinking about core components of an assignment and how they relate to course content. and check out .
Creating a Culture of Feedback
Students need to have a positive experience with feedback in order to be open to receiving it and thinking critically about how it can be implemented. This doesn鈥檛 mean that feedback can鈥檛 contain constructive criticism, but it does mean that you and your students will benefit from creating a positive culture around feedback.
Steps for creating a culture of feedback:
More Tips on Giving Feedback
- Take some time to familiarize yourself with how to provide feedback on Brightspace and how students access this feedback.
- (including how to provide inline and overall feedback)
- .
- Limit yourself to commenting on 2-3 areas of an assignment. Provide one positive comment and one piece of constructive feedback per area.
- Try to spend equivalent amounts of time on each student鈥檚 assignment. Set a timer for a few minutes per student and take breaks when you need to!
- Not all assignments require written feedback. As stated earlier, end of semester assignments don鈥檛 need feedback unless required by the course instructor/coordinator. Feedback on small formative assessments could be provided using shorthand, such as a check-mark for adequate completion or a circle around answers that the student needs to revisit. If you use shorthand, make sure your students know what the symbols indicate.
Parts of this section were adapted from: