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Supporting Learners: Feedback

In this podcast, Dr. Naomi Winstone discusses her research on students' use and internalization of feedback. 

How do students use feedback? (34:14 min) click the icon below.

Feedback is more useful to learners when they understand it as a process for improving rather than a singular assessment of their work or practice at a point in time.

There are a variety of feedback practices and techniques to engage students in the feedback process, but creating a culture of trust is more important than the method of feedback. Feedback should show that you care and are interested in students’ learning (McArthur, 2018).

General Feedback
Rather than providing comments on individual work, general feedback focuses on the common strengths and weaknesses of the class. It is most effective as formative assessment because it gives students the chance to directly  improve their work. It should never be the only way feedback in a module, but it can reduce faculty workload. 

General feedback can work much better than slow and perfect feedback as it has to be fast enough that students are still interested (Gibbs, 2015). It can deal with recurring issues, explain and expand on comments, compare alternative answers and approaches to a question, and focus on common misunderstandings. Because it addresses issues immediately, it works to keep learners on track. Additionally, once general feedback is developed for an assessment, it can be reused for future classes.

Peer Evaluation
In peer evaluation or peer review students give feedback to each other. This allows students to understand and apply relevant criteria. There is no grading, so focus is on the work rather than scores.

Peer evaluation activities can take place at any time, with almost any piece of work, including exams. There are a variety of technologies to facilitate this, including wikis, blogs, discussion forums, Peermark  (Turnitin), Peerwise, Pebblepad , etc.

Students learn more from each other’s strengths and weaknesses than from faculty assessments. Feedback provided by peers is more accessible and understandable than that provided by teachers (Falchikov 2004).

Peer review and instruction:

  • increases the sense of community and establishes social networks.

  • underscores the idea that academic work has a real audience, simulating the process of the workplace (Liu and Carless, 2006).

  • saves faculty time in giving formative feedback and facilitates a shift towards more formative assessments without increasing workload. (It is important that students don’t see peer review as just a way to reduce faculty workload).

  • requires time for students to practice with understanding and applying criteria and ways of giving constructive feedback.

  • should be reciprocal and constructive.

Here are some common peer evaluation activities:

    • Two-stage Assignments- feedback on drafts

    • Collaborative writing

    • Interview panel: students grade and give feedback on one classmate's presentation and are rotated so that everyone gets an opportunity to give and receive feedback.

    • Recorded presentations for feedback

    • Group work: students evaluate peers’ contributions to group work.

Assessment and feedback should be linked early in planning your course. Note how Professor Mazur's instruction design integrates feedback.

Audio Feedback

Audio feedback provides digitally recorded comments to students.

It enhances engagement:

    • It is richer than written feedback and increases the level of personalization, as the expression, nuance, tone and personal input add layers of meaning for the listener (Carruthers et al, 2015).

    • It increases feedback and reduces the amount of time spent on writing feedback.

    • It can give depth to feedback rather than long list of edits or comments without context or relative weight (Chiang, 2009).

    • It is better suited for students who have challenges with written feedback. 

    • It can be stored and revisited.

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