Rainbow feedback introduces colours to combine the marking/grading (evaluation of student performance) by highlighting students’ answers - or written feedback - in different colours.
This feedback strategy was inspired by one of my students, who was visually impaired. After attempting all tutorial questions, he sought feedback on a weekly basis. When I realised his difficulties in reading through my written feedback, I started to highlight his answers in different colours so that he understood what is relevant and not relevant from his draft.
Eventually, I modified this practice and adopted it to provide feedback to assignments in Banking and Finance Regulation (BTF5112). I found it to be a very effective strategy since highlighting could be easily done in Moodle. It also helps students to rationalise the marks/grade awarded to them for an assessment, through providing them with a more nuanced approach - using colours.
A constant area of student dissatisfaction in my units over years has been the quality of assessment feedback - an issue common at Monash. In SETUs, the quality of feedback criteria scored the lowest of all SETU criteria. SETU comments also indicated that:
In addition to SETUs, many studies have now established that inadequate feedback negatively impacts on student learning and results in student dissatisfaction.
| Create the colour code For example, shading each sentence in an assignment/answer with an allocated colour can indicate negative marks (red), positive marks (green), bonus marks (golden), and suggestions with no impact on marks (blue). |
| Choose highlight or comment colour The feedback comments by the instructor can also be provided in different colours, indicating negative marks, bonus marks, positive remarks, and suggestions. |
| Help students decode the feedback Students can easily rationalise why they have lost marks (red), or gained marks (green). They also feel rewarded with the bonus marks (golden) awarded for their additional work. Allocating specific colours to each sentence helps students to understand the instructor has effectively gone through the complete assignment/answer than a peripheral scanning and provides a ‘personal touch’ to the feedback. |
| Use for Equity and Inclusiveness Rainbow feedback can be particularly useful to students with reading disabilities and complements the University’s commitment to equity and inclusiveness. |
The Banking and Finance Regulation(BTF5112) unit that implemented rainbow feedback has an average score of 4.44 on the feedback criteria in the SETU-Unit evaluations, which is far greater than the 4.16 of units without rainbow feedback.
Constructive feedback also contributes to enhancing the overall student learning experience leading to purple teaching evaluations and an average overall satisfaction score of 4.57 over two years for the unit.
Perhaps the most visible impact of rainbow feedback has been zero complaints from students on assessment feedback over two years and many students seeking feedback in the coloured format in other units.
"…I would also appreciate any feedback you can provide, similar to the mid-semester exam, so I can improve for the following semesters. …I am grateful to you for all the effort you put into teaching this class, especially providing colored feedback, summary notes, being responsive through emails and also revising the content to ensure we can still learn all the key learnings through this COVID period…."
"……I really appreciated ILAC and the structure that brought to the thought process. The coloured constructive feedback helped to understand the grading and additional materials provided by the tutor were also much appreciated…."
This exemplar is easy to implement.
Recommended resources and training:
The method of using coloured feedback depends on the way that feedback is provided to students. Educators can easily use this teaching practice if student assignment submission is facilitated through Moodle using the inline grading tool. Alternatively, feedback that is provided in a separate document can be coloured in the same way and then uploaded to Moodle in the overall feedback section.
Allocate colours for negative marks, positive marks, bonus marks or other features that match the grading criteria.
Incorporating colours to marking/grading is best suitable for assignment submissions above 1,000 word length. Based on the Unit’s needs, you may simplify the methodology to use two or three colours or any number of colours of your choice.
If your assessment is not a written assignment, then you may consider providing the feedback comments in different colours so that students can rationalise the marking and improve their feedback literacy. Improved feedback literacy, on the part of students, decreases their dissatisfaction levels as they come to more fully understand how they might improve their work moving forwards.
Here are some images that further demonstrate the Rainbow Feedback teaching practice.
