Meet student needs with feedback

• What are your expectations when receiving feedback from others?
  • Is there a delivery mode that you prefer? (think about verbal, visual, written, etc. possibilities)
  • When would you like to receive feedback? (think about the time between action and feedback, the time within a semester, etc.)
  • What content do you want to see addressed?
  • How do you want to engage with feedback?
  • How would you want to be able to demonstrate your understanding of the feedback received?
• What times do you remember where you really connected to the feedback given to you and you were able to learn from it?
  • Was there a technique used that stands out to you?
  • Could you demonstrate your learning in a follow-up assignment or were you able to make corrections according to the feedback?
  • What was your emotional state?
• What times do you remember where you received feedback that didn’t help you?
  • Do you remember the feeling the feedback invoked?
  • What would you have wanted to be done differently?
  • Are there topics that weren’t acknowledged or addressed that you would have wanted to discuss?
  • Were you able to ask for clarification and if yes, what was the response to this?

It can be difficult to keep students needs in relation to feedback front and centre when you have your own needs/requirements around providing that feedback (especially when tied to the act of marking, ie, keeping to time, consistency of response), but it is important to keep learners as the focal point for the process because they are ultimately the end recipient of what you create.

Where possible make feedback actionable and explicit – I’m sure it feels obvious to some people but it is really hard for a student to learn from ‘good introduction’ or ‘confusing sentence’.

A clear understanding of what to do next

While it might be tempting to focus particularly on what they needed to improve in the piece of work they have submitted, for students, this specific work is swiftly moving out of relevance – they are not going back to change this particular assignment so such comments would not carry a great deal of weight. There is the thought that you could provide such notes in the anticipation that students will be able to extrapolate from these comments to apply the learning to future work, but this is anticipating a high level of subject and learning awareness that students may not have. A focus that students will appreciate is specific comments in relation to what they can do to improve in future assignments, i.e. feedforward. Your capacity to do this will be dependent on your knowledge of the following assignments, and how they align with one another. To get the greatest visibility here this is something potentially something to discuss with your subject coordinator.

A clear understanding of how their work aligns with the expected standards

If you are able to show students where their work aligns this will help them to build up the skill to self assess their own work as part of their development process. As part of this you might find that giving them other work to compare to (as in external/professional work, not the work of their peers) might give them a chance to see these standards better. This comparing function also allows them to develop their own internal feedback, ie. see what is different and perceive what they might need to do to close the gap.

Avoid mark justification

Be careful not to slip towards ‘mark justification’ – that is, focusing primarily around pointing out why students received the mark that they did and not a higher one. This is a practice that naturally occurs, as marking can sometimes be a subjective experience and consequently, feedback can become a space for you to rationalise the mark you are giving, in theory for the student, but ultimately for yourself. This can also occur because many students see this as the aim of feedback – to make a case for the difference between the mark they were expecting and the actual mark they received. You do need to point out components in standards (which are inevitably tied to grading levels) and relate it to student work, so it is a balance, but this is a note to self-check and make sure that you do not shift to this as a primary practice.

In-process feedback

During the process of developing work, students would generally like you to tell them exactly what they should do to meet approval (wouldn’t we all like this clarity), but of course the learning is often tied to the choices they need to make for themselves. For in-process feedback (feedback you are giving to students during the creation of their work), there are a couple of things that are good to focus on.

Direction and confidence: give advice on where their energy may be the best spent

In seeking feedback during an assignment development process students are commonly looking for validation of what they have done as they try to navigate this new space and understand what the rubric means in relation to the work they have done (‘Is this the sort of thing you guys are after?’). This is your opportunity to tell them what elements are the clearest (or clearly in line with the rubric expectations) in order to create confidence in what they have done, in addition to pointing out what could be made clearer. You can also ask them what they think they should do next/what they were planning to do next: through this question, you can see whether they have considered it, what ideas they might have that you can guide, or whether they are feeling a bit lost.

Inspiration and expansion: give them energy, help them find it for themselves

Students can also benefit from a bit of juice at this point, by being excited about what they have done and the potential for what comes next, you can give them the energy to tackle the next component. As a subject matter expert, you can suggest further things that they could investigate or other potential pathways they might not have been able to identify easily themselves. Hopefully, seeing clear actions ahead of them helps them move forward with further momentum.  You could also suggest comparison work (as in external/professional work, not the work of their peers) that they could use to give themselves further feedback/orientation.

While the above imagines a 1-to-1 scenario, (you sitting with a student or making comments on their work), depending on the flexibility of your tutorials/contact time with students you may be able to include experiences to make use of peer feedback. While some peer feedback systems are quite involved and require a certain degree of investment from students, you may introduce some smaller-scale elements effectively.

Teacher viewpoint

• What are your expectations when providing feedback to others?
  • How would you like to see them engage with the feedback provided?
  • Do you leave room for questions from them?

A fairly common practice is for individuals to slip into rating students according to the standards that they themselves would be rated on (this is particularly the case for someone currently undertaking a postgrad degree). If you live with these standards and expectations, can be hard to switch them off when looking at someone else’s work. Similarly it can be hard to re-gear expectations back to zero with every new cohort – especially when you have been teaching for a few years.

Take a moment to consider the sorts of things that you didn’t have an awareness of when you were undertaking the same course/ or were in the same year of university. Casting your mind back, you are likely to become aware of how far you yourself have come. 

Keep in mind as well that you are probably in the position that you are (acting as teaching staff at the university) because you were, and are, an exceptional student. Students don’t have to reach the same level that you were at when completing the course to be competent, they just need to adequately respond to the assessment criteria. A fundamental grasp might be a large step forward for that student in response to their own goals – try to balance your feedback accordingly.