From Academic Leadership
Providing Students with Effective Feedback
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Feb 12, 2007 - 2:45:34 PM
Providing Students with Effective Feedback
Article
Feedback is a classroom process that has been under the researchers’
microscopes since the 1970’s to the present, and with good cause—it’s a
teacher practice that works. Consistently, researchers have found that
when teachers effectively employ feedback procedures, they positively
and often powerfully impact the achievement of their students. In
fact, Bellon, Bellon, and Blank note, “Academic feedback is more
strongly and consistently related to achievement than any other
teaching behavior….This relationship is consistent regardless of grade,
socioeconomic status, race, or school setting….When feedback and
corrective procedures are used, most students can attain the same level
of achievement as the top 20% of students.”
So, if effective feedback is so powerful, what exactly are its
components? Research has shown that effective feedback is not a
discrete practice, but an integral part of an instructional dialogue
between teacher and student, (or between students, or between the
student and him/herself). Black and Wiliam cite three essential
elements of what they term enhanced feedback:
~recognition of the desired goal,
~evidence about present position, and
~some understanding of a way to close the gap between the two.
Recognition of the desired goal. Since feedback is given in response to
student performance, and student performance is an attempt to show
mastery of a learning goal, clarity of the learning goal is where the
feedback package begins. Teachers must be clear about their content
area, curricular indicators, and mastery objectives. They need to
clearly communicate the desired learning goal to students through
instruction.
One extremely effective method for ensuring that students understand
learning goals is to engage them in defining what successful
achievement of the goals looks or sounds like. Teachers can provide
several samples of products that achieve the learning goal in exemplary
fashion--sentences with correct capitalization, conclusions drawn from
data, analyses of cause and effect, line graphs--and then lead students
in an analysis of the criteria that all the samples have in common.
Once students have derived these "criteria for success," they are
better able to incorporate them into their own work.
In addition to leading students to a clear understanding of the
learning goal, teachers need to provide students with opportunities to
indicate their levels of mastery of that goal. Only when students have
“performed”—orally, in writing, or in another form--is when what we
normally consider feedback enters the scene.
Evidence about present position. The use of the word “evidence” conveys
one of the most vital aspects of effective feedback: it is information
about how the performance relates to the learning goal—specifically,
how that goal has been met and how it has not been met. As Grant Wiggin
states, “Feedback is not about praise or blame, approval or
disapproval. That’s what evaluation is—placing value. Feedback is
value-neutral. It describes what you did and did not do.” In addition
to being objective and descriptive, effective feedback is timely,
delivered while the learning goal is still fresh in the learner’s mind.
One meaningful way to provide feedback is to compare the student
product to the criteria for success that students helped derive or that
the teacher had communicated to them. This feedback could simply be in
the form of a list of the criteria for success which can be attached to
the student product, with a + sign denoting the criteria that have been
met and a highlighting of the criteria not yet met.
Understanding of a way to close the gap between the two. The third
component of effective feedback is that it must “give each pupil
guidance on how to improve, and each pupil must be given help and an
opportunity to work on the improvement.” [Black and Wiliam] Not only
must feedback provide a mirror to the student in terms of how his/her
performance relates to the learning goal, it must also provide
strategies and tips on how to achieve that goal, as well as the
opportunity to apply the feedback. Shirley Clarke calls these tips
“closing the gap” prompts; she suggests these prompts can take several
forms, including reminders, suggestions, and questions. One example
might be to suggest that the student revisit examples or models
generated together in class; another might be to provide new samples
that exemplify the missing trait.
Wiggins agrees that it is only through this cycle of feedback that
excellence results: “Students must have routine access to the criteria
and standards for the task they need to master; they must have feedback
in their attempts to master those tasks; and they must have
opportunities to use the feedback to revise work and resubmit it for
evaluation against the standard. Excellence is attained by such cycles
of model-practice-perform-feedback-perform.”
Bibliography
Bellon, Jerry, Bellon, Elner, and Blank, Mary Ann. Teaching from a
Research Knowledge Base: A Development and Renewal Process. New York:
Macmillan Publishing Company, 1992. (pp. 277-278)
Black, Paul, and Wiliam, Dylan. “Inside the Black Box: Raising
Standards through Classroom Assessment,” Phi Delta Kappan. October
1998.
Clarke, Shirley. Unlocking Formative Assessment: Practical strategies
for enhancing pupils’ learning in the primary classroom. London: Hodder
& Stoughton, 2001.
Gregory, Kathleen, Camerson, Caren, and Davies, Anne. Setting and Using
Criteria. Merville, BC, Canada: Connections Publishing, 1997.
Marzano, Robert. What Works in Schools: Translating Research into
Action. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2003. (p.37)
Wiggins, Grant. Educative Assessment: Designing Assessments to Inform
and Improve Student Performance. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., 1998.
(p. 64)
Wiggins, Grant. “Feedback: How Learning Occurs, A Presentation from the
1997 AAHE Conference on Assessment & Quality.” Pennington, NJ: The
Center on Learning, Assessment, and School Structure, 1997.
© Copyright 2007 by Academic Leadership
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