What is good feedback?

Provide students with:

• written statements of the assessment criteria and/or standards that define different levels of achievement;
• examples of standards/levels of work;
• carefully constructed criteria sheets;
• opportunities to discuss and reflect upon criteria and standards in class (before an assignment);
• opportunities to mark or comment on other students’ work;
• opportunities to devise or negotiate their own assessment criteria.

Engage students to:

• identify criteria and standards that will apply to their work;
• make judgements on how their own work relates to these standards;
• make judgments on each other’s work;
• regularly reflect on criteria and standards;
• request the types of feedback they want;
• self-assess work before submitting it for marking;
• reflect on past work and feedback in a portfolio;
• reflect on past progress before planning future actions and milestones.

Provide feedback information that is:

• timely, corrective, constructive and prioritised;
• about future actions (feed forward);
• limited in quantity (a usable amount);
• online and automated - available anywhere, anytime and repeatedly.

Provide:

• regular, low-stakes formative assessments with feedback on personal progress (i.e. ipsative, not their ranking in the class);
• feedback on the performance (not the student as a person);
• marks only after students have responded to feedback comments;
• time for students to resubmit selected assignments – to influence their expectations of learning and assessment;
• automated assessment (self-tests) with feedback;
• opportunities for students to submit drafts and receive feedback before making final submissions.

Provide:

• feedback on work in progress;
• more opportunities for students to resubmit assignments;
• introduce two-stage assignments where feedback on stage one helps improve stage two;
• demonstrations of the strategies you want students to follow – to reduce the gap between actual and expected standards of performance (e.g. by showing students how to set about structuring an essay, writing an abstract, analysing data, drafting a research proposal);
• action points to help students monitor and manage their assignments;
• opportunities for students to work in groups and to identify their own action points in class after they have received feedback (i.e. integrate feedback into the teaching and learning process – involve students in generation and use of feedback).

Gather data by a variety of methods:

• collect data regularly on student progress (for instance, from assessments, questions in class, student behaviour/performances);
• identify student difficulties with the subject matter or study methods;
• use frequent tests, especially diagnostic tests, to generate cumulative information about students’ knowledge and skills;
• promote students’ (metacognitive) thinking about their own learning, for example: set questions at the beginning of a session to be answered by students at the end:
    -  What was the most important argument in this lecture?
    -  What question remains uppermost in your mind at the end of this session?
• play back to students their answers to these questions in the following teaching session;
• ask students to request the feedback they would like when they submit an assignment (e.g. on a feedback proforma);
• ask students to identify the difficulties they encountered with an assignment;
• encourage students to identify a ’question worth asking’ that they would like to explore for a short time in the next tutorial.