Research from several studies reveals ways to develop better feedback to students, according to an article in Education Week:
- Make comments specific rather than general. Teachers could say, “use more examples from the text to support this argument,” rather than labeling a student essay as a “weak argument.”
- Connect comments to learning goals and criteria associated with an assignment.
- Feedback should specify what students should do or think about, not just evaluate overall quality.
- Develop a class culture that is positive by receiving and using feedback without it being a “failure.”
Keep feedback separate from grades, advises Margaret Heritage, a senior scientist at WestEd and author of the book, Formative Assessment: Making it Happen in the Classroom. Many schools in the United Kingdom create separate grading and feedback policies to improve students’ understanding of an assignment rather than focusing on boosting a score, she notes.
Feedback could be the factor that makes students learn and work, says Martin Van Boekel, an assistant teaching professor at the University of Minnesota. “But… there are a lot of barriers to user feedback that could undermine it, or make students actually do worse than they would have if they got no feedback at all.”
Van Boekel and his colleagues assigned students an essay summarizing information from an article; the texts were given feedback and students were recorded as they thought through their responses to the feedback aloud.
Nearly half of the time students considered teachers’ comments as just text to read, rather than a tool to improve their work or to think more broadly. Students spent less than 10 percent of their time thinking through what they didn’t understand about the assignment or content or inferring ways to improve their work. Students rarely asked for help or clarification in response to feedback; few tried to respond to comments in revisions.
“We need to help students see feedback as information rather than just a score … and develop this idea that feedback is part of a process” of reviewing and improving learning, Van Boekel says.
The majority of students in a separate but related survey told researchers the primary purpose of feedback is to give strategies to grow academically and better understand material, but they wanted more task-specific feedback on what they did right or wrong in a particular activity.
Students with more negative judgments were less likely to say they were going to review the feedback and make changes to the essay.
Teachers should also monitor how students respond to the feedback they give, says Angela Lui of the City University of New York. “If [students] don’t understand it or think it is not useful, they will not use it.”
She found students were more likely to use feedback to improve their writing if it aligned with their understanding of the assignment’s expectations, and they were able to justify the feedback in their own words.
“We need to shift our understanding of feedback from something given to something received,” Liu says. “If students don’t understand it or think it is not useful, they will not use it.”
Feedback is more than encouraging students, according to a study by Anastasiya Lipnevich, an education psychology professor at Queens College in the City University of New York.
Students wrote a 750-word essay on evidence about climate change and Lipnevich and her colleagues then assigned them to one of three groups. The first group was given no feedback but was asked to reread their essays and identify ways to improve them. The second group was given detailed comments on improvements. The third group also received detailed feedback but prefaced with praise: “This is an excellent draft! You did a wonderful job presenting your arguments. Below are a few suggestions on how you can make it even better.”
All three groups were asked how motivated they were to make changes to their essays. Students who received detailed comments were more motivated to improve their essays than those who got no feedback. Students who had been told they had an excellent draft already were less likely to rework their essays than those who did not receive praise.
Education Week
