
"The most powerful single modification that enhances achievement is feedback. The simplest prescription for improving education must be dollops of feedback." - John Hattie
It is true that they need to know their work doesn't meet the target, but most struggling students already know that. Feedback that communicates "off by a mile" or a list of necessary improvements that is longer than the original assignment simply generates hopelessness. For these students, self-referenced feedback can bridge the gap.So, what is self referenced feedback?
[It] compares a student's work today with his or her own previous past performance or with your expectations for this student based on that past performance.It must be concrete and it must be authentic. It will not help students to receive empty praise or misguided encouragement. The desired effect is improvement-perhaps incremental and slow- but improvement nonetheless. To make improvement, students need to feel that improvement is possible- it is within their grasp. Seeing it a mile off will not help struggling students feel motivated to start on the journey.
No matter how successful a student is, there is always more that can be learned .It can be all too tempting to scrimp on feedback for students who are advanced because they are doing fine without it (in fact, this is the same argument for getting rid of GATE services and programs in many districts across the US). However, this would be a mistake. Learning is a process and advanced students have not arrived at the end of that process simply because they can demonstrate mastery of grade level concepts and skills.
Make sure you go over the last unit's test or assignment before launching into the next unit or assignment. Feedback isn't "feedback" unless it can truly feed something. Information delivered too late to be used isn't helpful. Make sure when you give feedback that there is time built in to actually use the information. Otherwise students will quickly learn to ignore feedback. - Susan M. Brookhart in How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students
The intention of feedback is to be formative, to help students learn. However, some excellent opportunities for providing feedback come after summative events.Though a unit may have ended, it is never to late for feedback to be effective. So, how should a teacher provide feedback after a summative assessment? Susan M. Brookhart offers a few suggestions in her aptly titled How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students.
The benefit of this is that students will be more likely to read through feedback and perhaps reflect on it since they have a concrete occasion when they will need it in the future, thereby retaining its relevance.
- for written feedback presented with the return of summative assessments (tests or assignments), explicitly tell the students when they will be able to use the feedback.
To me this looks like deliberate scaffolding of process skills. Though this second option seems just too easy, based on the omission of any stated drawbacks from this approach, Brookhart seems to suggest that this second approach is more effective. I am not sure that I agree, but I need to give it more thought. However, I can see how it would work well for a class presentation or project where many of the skills should be practiced and refined throughout a school year, but where redos would be difficult to pull off.
- plan your assessments and assignments so they do give students the opportunities to improve previous work, using feedback to develop skills in writing, problem solving, making presentations, doing research, or studying.
All students can benefit from feedback on summative assessment if you provide another opportunity to incorporate it.
Your details strongly support your claim that we should recycle newspapers. That's great. Where did you find all those facts?and
This report probably wouldn't convince a reader who didn't already agree we should recycle. What else could you do to make a more convincing argument?Both examples of feedback give the student an area to work on next.
Student response is the criterion against which you can evaluation your own feedback. Your feedback is good if it gets the following results:Well,this is the measuring stick--my personal performance target. I will revisit it over the next month as I work to improve the quality of feedback that I provide for my students.
- Your students do learn--their work does improve.
- Your students become more motivated--they believe they can learn, they want to learn, and they take more control over their own learning.
- Your classroom becomes a place where feedback, including constructive criticism, is valued and viewed as productive.
Probably the hardest decision to make about feedback is the amount to provide. A natural inclination is to want to "fix" everything you see.Oh, so true. It is the hardest decision when it comes to feedback because there is so much to write sometimes and not enough time to write it. Plus, I can easily fall into the trap of copy-editing, which often just overwhelms the students and doesn't really give the student specific ways to approach their next learning steps, if I am not careful. However, writing "Good" or some other such nebulous comment is also unhelpful it would seem. To make it even more challenging,
For real learning, what makes the difference is a usable amount of information that connects with something the students already knows and takes them from that point to the next level.The words that I fixate on in this sentence are the words usable and connects. For feedback to be usable, it has to meet the student where he or she is at developmentally. Right now, at the beginning of the year, it is difficult to keep all of my students' names straight- let alone understand where they are at developmentally. Furthermore, for feedback to connect, students have to hear it in such a way that they can see how it relates to their current performance and gives them a direction for improvement. This means that it needs to not be too little or too much because both create confusion for the student. Which leaves one question: What is just right?
Judging the right amount of feedback to give--how much, on how many points--requires deep knowledge and consideration of the following:
This is difficult, and I can honestly say that I struggle with giving feedback that I can truly say advances the learning of my students. I give feedback, but I do not know to what extent is has been usable or has connected to the students- to what extent it is just right. However, it is an important part of the formative assessment process and I am not going to get better without practicing and going through the process. Just like in the story of Goldilocks, just right always came after too much and too little. Right?
- The topic in general and your learning target or targets in particular
- Typical developmental learning progressions for those topics or targets
- Your individual students