Feedback for Struggling Students

Brookhart describes struggling students as those who "don't have solid prior learning experiences or don't have the learning skills to process the information;" she includes "both learning disabled students and students who, though not identified with a learning deficiency, did not get the foundation they needed as learners."

For these students, a teacher should use feedback that focuses explicitly on process, so students can become more aware of how they learn.  By pointing out which strategies students are employing, students can become more proficient at monitoring their own learning behavior and cognitive processing.

Though criterion-referenced feedback is advocated consistently by Brookhart, for struggling students she suggests self-referenced feedback when the work the student produced is too far "off the mark" to make the comparison helpful. 

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. 

What would this look like?  If the whole class is working on essay writing, and a struggling student turns in one paragraph, the teacher should provide feedback on the paragraph, commenting on the ways in which this paragraph is an improvement (if it in fact is) over previous paragraph writing done by the student.  If a student turns in a writing piece that does not live up to his or her previous performance, the teacher should have a conversation with the student, showing him/her the last writing piece and having him/her redo the current assignment so it is at least as good as the last one.

Improvement is the goal, and since it looks different for every student, the feedback needs to be differentiated as well.