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.

Next Steps: Feedback for Advanced Students

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. 

According to Brookhart, advanced students benefit from the same type of feedback that all other students benefit from: task and process focused, criterion-referenced, positive, clear, and specific.  Feedback for advanced students, just like for all students, needs to feed-forward.  Though an advanced student may have fulfilled the requirements of the assignment, flawlessly even, a teacher can still use feedback to provoke thought and offer further direction, making "a suggestion for a next step, mindful that the next step may be an enrichment of the basic learning goals."

Feedback that Feeds

This paragraph is just too rich not to quote verbatim.

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

Photo by Wayne MacPhail

Using Feedback with Summative Assessment

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.

1.  Allow students to resubmit the same assignment.  I do this for the research paper my students write, and I find that it is effective at getting students to revise and incorporate the feedback. The obvious draw back...it takes a lot of time.  However, a more subtle drawback can be that the assessment changes from "indicating the achievement of certain learning goals to indicating the ability to follow the teachers directions."  Depending on how thoroughly the teacher "corrected" the errors in the paper, the student may just go through on auto-pilot and change what has been identified.  Therefore, the student is not demonstrating their mastery of commas; instead, he/she is demonstrating my mastery of commas.  I can see Brookhart's point, but I think that there are ways around this drawback if the teacher provides judicious feedback that asks questions and requires the student to problem solve instead of providing answers through extensive marking.
  
2. Provide students with another similar assignment where they can incorporate the feedback into a new situation, thereby extending their learning.  To do this, Brookhart suggests:

• 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.

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.

• 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.

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. 

After reading this section, I still do not see how either relate to large-scale summative assessments (ie: state testing) when the students do not receive their scores back until after the end of the year.  However, both options could work for in-class summative assesments at the end of a unit or project because

All students can benefit from feedback on summative assessment if you provide another opportunity to incorporate it.

Looking at Descriptive Feedback

Not all feedback is good feedback.  In fact, research on feedback has shown that some types of feedback contribute to further learning and some feedback contributes little or nothing to further learning.  Because "Students filter what they hear through their own past experiences, good and bad," it may be helpful to couch feedback in terms that make further learning more likely.  To do this, research says feedback should be descriptive (informative) rather than evaluative.

In order to increase the chances that students will interpret feedback as descriptive, rather than evaluative, a teacher can implement a few practices.
1.  Students should be given several opportunities "to practice and receive feedback without a grade attached."
2. Feedback should describe what can be seen- "how close is it to your learning target? What do you think would help?"

The content of descriptive feedback describes what was done well and why it is good; it also describes what else the student can do to improve both in the task and in the process. Though Brookhart cautions that all feedback needs to be considered in context, she offers multiple examples of feedback that could be considered descriptive: 

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.

On a personal note, I do point out when students do something well, but I do not always make sure that they understand why I consider it well done.  This is something I need to work on incorporating more deliberately into my feedback.


Photo by DownTown Pictures

A Measuring Stick for Feedback

So, how can I check to see if my feedback is connecting to students?  According to Susan M. Brookhart,

Student response is the criterion against which you can evaluation your own feedback.  Your feedback is good if it gets the following results:

• 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.

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.

Photo by Scott Akerman

For a Bird's Eye View

Brookhart published an article called "Feedback that Fits" in Educational Leadership, which serves as a summary or overview of How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students.

Photo by Rajesh Vijayarajan Photography