Explore practical strategies for embedding feedback into your teaching, including moderation for consistency, peer feedback, rubrics, exemplars, audio and video feedback, generative AI and automated feedback. Find guidance on using Feed Forward for formative student evaluation and dictating comments directly in Moodle.
Listed here are a few strategies you could use when integrating feedback into your teaching practice.
The quality of feedback is often variable across educators and markers. Research has shown that the impact of feedback and student satisfaction increases when staff are trained and the feedback is moderated for consistency (Dawson, 2017; Dawson et. al, 2019). To implement this approach, it’s essential for all educators and markers to agree on a shared standard for grading and feedback, and to adopt a common language that promotes clarity and fairness.
Peer feedback is described as a “communication process through which learners enter into dialogue related to performance and standards" (Liu & Carless, 2006). It provides opportunities for students to give one another feedback and learn from each other. This should not be confused with peer assessment where a student might provide a grade on another students’ work.
Peer feedback can be incorporated as an assessment for learning tasks where students offer each other advice or recommendations on their work.
Provide clear expectations and guidelines to enable students to provide effective feedback to their peers. Embedding peer feedback processes in learning activities can improve student feedback literacy.
Dedicated tools such as FeedbackFruits could be used for this type of feedback.
Rubrics may be used as a way to organise feedback on specific criteria for learning and performance on a continuum. You could combine this method with written or video feedback to provide feedback.
RubricsRubrics could be used as a method for self-assessment. Providing clear guidelines so that students understand the self-assessment steps followed by providing a comparative approach and discussion could assist in aligning their perception of performance against actual performance.
Providing students with a range of exemplars of previous work or excerpts of work that were deemed of high quality can greatly help students understand what each level of performance looks like and clarifies assessment expectations for students.
Ideally, exemplars should be excerpts of work with annotation to inform discussions with students and not provided in isolation. Then, discussing these samples of work with students in class can help students develop their self-evaluative capabilities and lead to more meaningful feedback being provided by the educator. Remember to seek permission from students to share their work or samples of their work. Generative AI tools can be used to create exemplars of different standards based on your rubric
Video and audio are powerful tools in providing personalised and focused feedback (Ryan et al. 2019). They provide the opportunity to talk through a student’s individual assignment, point by point, or provide broader constructive comments that will strengthen students’ understanding of the field and their performance in future assessment tasks.
It could also be combined with written feedback, for example, provide written feedback for specific parts of a paper and video or audio to provide overall feedback or strategies for the student to improve their paper.
There are a number of ways to create the video feedback including: Panopto video, your smartphone, Moodle built-in feature or any other recording device.
Seven steps to creating video feedback
Regardless of whether your video uses talking heads or screencasting, the structure of the recording can remain the same.
The following diagram outlines seven steps that have been tested across Faculties and provide an excellent model for the structure and content of the feedback - view the handout
Gen AI tools can assist the educators to provide clear actionable feedback, based on the rubric or marking criteria. Students can use Gen AI tools as an interactive coach to refine arguments or drafts.
Note: Student work should not be uploaded to a third-party AI platform unless explicit consent has been provided by the student, no identifying information is present, and the data will not be used for model training.
Explore the Feedback activities section of Teaching about and teaching with AI for ideas, examples and considerations for using AI.
Automated feedback provides students with immediate feedback which has been built-into the activity or assessment task. Depending on the technology, feedback can be provided for an overall question or for individual responses within a question.
It is important that the feedback given in the activity provides thoughtful and relevant feedback that will help learners improve their understanding rather than simply stating correct or incorrect. This feedback approach can be especially useful for learning tasks that are self-paced or for large cohorts. Generative AI tools can be useful for streamlining the creation of this type of feedback. Explore the related technology section for Moodle activities and associated tools that enable automated feedback.