Implement feedback strategies
Listed here are a few strategies you could use when integrating feedback into your teaching practice.
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. If following this approach, it is important to get all educators/markers to approve on a standard of marking and feedback and encourage a shared language. Here is an example of feedback moderation at scale (in this case audio feedback).
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. There are a few strategies that can be used to enhance peer feedback. It is beneficial to provide clear expectations and guidelines for providing peer feedback to ensure its success.
Rubrics can be a good framework for feedback as they organise the criteria for learning and performance on a continuum. You could combine this method with written or video feedback to give particular feedback and identify how the work can be enhanced.
Rubrics could be used as a method for self-assessment where students mark their perceived performance on the rubric and then you could have a discussion to compare their self-assessment with your assessment by providing clear guidelines and strategies to improve the students’ outcome and learning.
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.
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 use a video or audio to provide overall feedback or strategies for the student to improve their paper. To create the video feedback, you could use Panopto video, your smartphone, 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 diagram below outlines seven steps that have been tested across Faculties and provide an excellent model for the structure and content of the feedback, a handout can be found here.
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 provided 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. See the Related technology section for examples.