Feeling the pressure to provide students with timely and effective feedback? It’s a common challenge for busy academics, especially when managing large cohorts. To help ensure you’re covering all the basics, try our quick evaluation tool. It can help you sense-check the components of your feedback and offer pointers on how to enhance it.
By submitting answers to this poll you will help to create an amalgam picture of how well lecturers at Bath feel they are doing at providing effective feedback. You can find the radar map at the bottom of this page. Paste the participation code into a new tab to complete the survey. Once you have answered return to this page and click refresh to see how your answers alter the radar map.
When evaluating feedback, it may be helpful to consider whether it is…
Research shows that students want feedback that is useable, detailed and personalised to their performance (Dawson et al, 2019). Does your feedback make it clear what the student could do to improve their work for next time? Depending on the nature of the work you are feeding back on this may involve referring to the ‘process’ they should use to achieve a better ‘product’. For example, would there be an easier way of troubleshooting their code? Or a method of experimental measuring that would minimize the margin of error? Have you given the appropriate level of detail so that students can follow your advice? Actionable feedback also takes a course-wide approach, emphasizing areas for improvement that the student is likely to rely on is their next round of assessment.
Ideally students are told upfront what they are being marked on so they can channel their efforts accordingly. The marking criteria then provides a framework for the marker to grade and provide feedback. Without this criteria linking, which Li and De Luca (2012) found to be a key preference of students, they may feel that the feedback is given is tangential or irrelevant.
Feedback that is appropriately prioritised will concentrate on the areas worth the highest marks first. For example, if there is a conceptual or category error or a theory has been misapplied that has a large effect on the student’s overall mark then it is appropriate to address this in your feedback prior to more minor errors, such as imprecise punctuation, which is likely to lose them fewer marks. The marking criteria that indicates these weightings are often arranged around assessment lenses (see figure below). The communication lens focuses on how well expressed something is, whether it’s adapted to the audience, whether referencing, grammar and spelling are accurate etc. The knowledge lens refers to the recall of relevant empirical facts, theoretical concepts and so on, while the application lens looks at the application of knowledge and/or skills to a given task.
Many factors come into play when giving feedback, such as beliefs around the assessment, trust in the assessment criteria, or an emotional judgment on whether the student has sufficiently respected the assessment process (Wong, 2020). It is important to try and counteract these biases to ensure that feedback remains as objective as possible, and the ordering of it refers back to the assessment criteria and weightings indicated to students in the assessment brief.
- It may seem obvious, but one of the most important factors for feedback is that its meaning is clear. Where feedback is free from ambiguity the potential for different interpretations is shut down. It is therefore linked to the ‘actionable’ principle, since unambiguous feedback will make clear the merits and flaws of an assignment and can then become the basis for the student to improve.
Key considerations when phrasing unambiguous feedback are to avoid cultural idioms that may not be understood by the student. For example, ‘take this with a pinch of salt’ might mystify many students whose first language is not English. It is also important in your feedback to either avoid jargon or acronyms the student is unfamiliar with, or to explain these.
Although it is important to avoid ambiguity, it is also important to be sensitive to students’ feelings. Research shows that if students are not emotionally receptive to the feedback, for example they perceive it as a personal attack, they will not assimilate that feedback into their practice (Fulham et al, 2022).
Where possible connect your feedback directly to the students work. It is possible to provide feedback that is unambiguous and clearly linked to the marking criteria, but if the student does not recognise how it applies to their own work then it is likely to have little effect. This is one of the strengths of annotated feedback, as the examples are immediately apparent. It is also one of the weaknesses of whole cohort feedback, as, although it may well have elements of applicability to every student’s work, this is not always obvious to individual students. If you have limited time for feedback and whole cohort feedback seems the best option, you could try coupling this with a coded approach to marking. For example, letting student A know they should refer particularly to point 8 and telling student B to concentrate on point 4.