Tips for providing more effective feedback

I am choosing to post on how to provide more effective feedback to students because I find it very important. When a teacher would grade my paper as an A- and offer no suggestions to improve my grade or even how I obtained that grade, I would always get frustrated. While grades are important and have their place in education, students learn more from descriptive feedback rather than just a grade slapped on a paper.

I think that the book we use for this class is very helpful in suggesting ways to give more effective feedback. It states “feedback is always adaptive. Effective feedback is more than keeping in mind a few important principles such as keep feedback brief and individualized…Rather, good feedback depends on appropriate teacher decision making and responses to students contingent on several important variables.”(Page, 135) In summary, this quote is saying that as a teacher in order to provide effective feedback you must consider the whole picture, including how the student learns, what the goals of the assignment are, prior work, and even how the other students in the class preformed. The book lists more specific areas that you should be conscious of when giving feedback. They are: the amount of feedback you give, the timing in which you give it, the mode or how you give the feedback (verbal, oral, or demonstrative), the audience you are giving feedback too, and the type of task that you are giving feedback about. I will focus on the amount of feedback that is helpful to students, the amount of time that you should try to give feedback within, and how to give the best feedback for certain tasks.

In general, it is important to give specific and descriptive feedback so that your students know exactly what they did well or need to improve on. However, you do want to be careful not to give too much feedback, instead just focus on one or two important points that you want the student to do better. I know in my clinic placement when my cooperating teacher corrects my students’ sentences instead of correcting every word that is misspelled she will focus on a couple that she thinks are important for the student to know. My cooperating teacher may also focus on different skills when correcting sentences she may notice that a student is writing all their Ks backwards, and also misspelling words. She might choose to only focus on writing the ks the right way today and come back to the other skill tomorrow. If she was to focus on all of the errors, the child could become overwhelmed with corrections and begin to feel as thought there are so many errors there is not point in trying because they will never get it right.

Most of the time it is important to give immediate feedback to students. If teachers wait too long students begin to forget what they actually did on the task. Giving immediate feedback also allows students to use the feedback constructively while they may still be learning information. However, when considering the timeframe of when to give feedback teachers should also consider the type of task and the audience that they are giving feedback to. Complex tasks, and students who are higher-ability benefit from delayed feedback. By delaying when the feedback is given students are give the opportunity to remove themselves from their work and will be able to reflect on their performance when they receive feedback with a clear mind.

Finally, as I have touched upon before different tasks need to receive feedback in different ways. If the student is participating in a performance task it is best for them to receive feedback immediately so that they can correct their performance right then and there. We already know that for complex tasks and high-ability learners feedback should be delayed. The converse of this is true for simple learning tasks. For them, feedback should be immediate as well as when students are learning a difficult new task. This type of feedback allows students to accomplish the tasks better because they know what they need to work on and what they are doing well.

The Role of Assessment in Teaching

As the first official blog post, I wanted to begin by highlighting some of the important ideas about the role that, according to my beliefs, assessments should play in teaching. While there is not one assessment that works well with all units, lessons, or populations of students, there are certainly assessments that serve purposes based on various objectives and learning goals that teachers set prior to teaching. As McMillan explains in her text, "The right kind of assessment, and the manner in which it is integrated with teaching, can have dramatic effects on how much is learned and how well something is performed" (p. 2). As we, as teachers, design a wide variety of assessments for our students, we must keep in mind that all assessments must not only provide us with information, but support and enhance student learning as much as possible.

As a pre-service teacher, I can imagine that reality of the world of teaching, despite my preparation and experience, is going to be chaotic and hectic when I first enter into it. Teaching is fast-paced, demanding, and very complex; decisions are made ALL the time through interactions. McMillan explains that teachers make anywhere between 1000 and 1500 interactions per day! Because of this, assessment is crucial in the process of decision making. In order to best meet the needs of students while consistently challenging them, teachers need to know what students already know, what they are learning, and what they still need to know. To find out this information about students, teachers should be using preassessments (prior to teaching to find out what students already know), formative assessments (during teaching to monitor progress, give feedback, and guide future instruction), and summative assessments (after assessments to find out what students have learned and can do). It is through these forms of assessment that assessment and teaching drive and guide one another.

Lastly, I wanted to discuss the importance of authenticity of assessments and the value of feedback. Whenever possible, assessments should be created in such a way that they focus on knowledge and skills that are "exhibited in real-life settings outside school that depict the student's best performance" (p. 16). This is because, as students feel that assessments are authentic and realize their importance to learning, they become more motivated. So how do teachers create authentic assessments? Teachers can create authentic assessments by involving students in the assessment-creating process. This process includes writing questions, asking questions along the way, and evaluating their own and the work of others. Students should also be provided with feedback about their achievement and progress so that "assessment for learning becomes as important as assessment of learning" (p. 16). When assessment for learning occurs, students understand that their feedback is based on their ability to achieve goals (presented to them beforehand). Students also become responsible for their learning, confidence is built, engagement increases, and instruction can be adjusted according to assessments before, during, and after instruction occurs.

(By: Christie Attanasio, Sec. 1)

Welcome!

Welcome to the UCONN Assessment blog where preservice teachers attending the Neag School of Education's Integrated Bachelor's and Master's program provide tips on a variety of assessment topics.  Soon to come are posts on:

• Preparing students for high-stakes assessments
• Discussing test results with parents
• New developments with the Smarter-balanced assessment
• Assessment news from around the country
• How to hold a data meeting
• Assessment techniques
• Grading methods
• Developing scoring rubrics
• Portfolio assessment
• Performance assessmnet
• Tips for providing more effective feedback, and
• Other interesting developments in the field of assessment