Feedback: How to make it timely, meaningful, and constructive
FEEDBACK: HOW TO MAKE IT TIMELY, MEANINGFUL, AND CONSTRUCTIVE
On this page, we will cover:
- What Kind of Feedback is Right?
- Tools to Return Feedback Quickly
- Remind Students How to Find Feedback
- References
Effective feedback is critical to student success; it helps students see what they did well, and where to focus their efforts to improve. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, n.d.). But as faculty, we know that providing meaningful, relevant, constructive feedback can be time consuming. So here are some strategies that will help you provide timely, constructive feedback that will help students improve, and will help save you time.
What Kind of Feedback is Right?
First, decide what kind of feedback will be most useful to the students for this assignment. In a quiz, you can provide comments on individual responses, or to the quiz at large. In discussions, you can provide responses in the comments feature in Speedgrader. But in a submitted assignment, you have more options. You can provide in-line comments in addition to the comments box. Those in-line comments can be the most time-consuming. So before you choose to do that, ask yourself if it is appropriate.
Limit the Comments
If you do decide that you’ll provide in line comments to a student, limit the scope of the feedback. Give yourself a set number of total comments, positive and negative, to include per page. Much as students would be overwhelmed by a paper bleeding with red ink, students may similarly be overwhelmed by an abundance of comments. It may be hard for them to know where to focus their attention for areas to improve.
Instead, prioritize. What are the greatest areas of concern? What matters most for your course objectives? Ideally, these will align to your rubrics. Look at ideas and organization more than grammar or mechanics. And if the language level issues are so serious as to disrupt the clarity of the work, consider focusing on only one paragraph per assignment, and providing links to additional resources, or the suggestion to visit the tutors at the Learning Resource Center.
The “Sandwich Approach”
Students take feedback on their writing seriously; writing is always personal, even if the student isn’t majoring in the topic. So consider delivering criticism, especially of ideas, in a way that honors the attempt and doesn’t discourage them from trying again. Abundant literature agrees that positive feedback encourages better student performance and helps mitigate the negative feelings that many students – particularly those who are less emotionally mature – get from negative feedback (Pitt & Norton, 2017). Avoid using “you” statements, and focus instead on the ideas and the areas that need improvement.
Using the Sandwich Approach can help make sure that the students aren’t getting only negative feedback. Couching your negative feedback in a positive context helps lessen the blow.
So, instead of “you missed the point here,” something like “This is a good idea, but this doesn’t quite demonstrate . . .”
Tools to Deliver Feedback Quickly
There’s no denying that providing personalized feedback can and will take time. So for those tasks that don’t require personalized feedback, there are tools that can help expedite the rest of the grading process.
Rubrics
Using a rubric has many benefits, not the least of which is saving you time returning meaningful feedback to students. A detailed rubric may take time to create, but once you use it, your students will see specifically where their work lands on a scale. And a sufficiently detailed rubric can provide helpful feedback quickly.
Canvas Comment Library
Once you’ve completed filling in the rubric and/or including line edits, you may want to provide some generalized comments on the assignment. For those, Canvas has a comment library Links to an external site. where you can save and store feedback. Typing in keywords that appear in that comment trigger an option to automatically insert that comment into the box, which can save a lot of time. Turnitin, which you can use to grade in Canvas, has a similar feature.
Audio/Video Comments
Perhaps the most personalized way to provide feedback is to create audio Links to an external site. or video Links to an external site. clips of your process reading and responding in real time to student work. This feature is also available in SpeedGrader, though you’ll need to be aware of accessibility considerations.
Third Party Tools
Some faculty save a document of comments that they open and use to copy and paste frequently made comments into Canvas or into the line-edits. There are also third party tools that allow you to do the same thing without having to copy or paste. Tools like Textexpander Links to an external site. can populate text across platforms (Canvas, emails, Kami) through the use of something like a hotkey.
Remind Students How to Find Your Feedback
Your feedback is only useful if your students are reviewing it. So help them find those comments. It is not intuitive to find in-line comments in Canvas’s gradebook, and it’s even harder to find when they’re using the app from their phones. Providing a video tutorial about where to find feedback and why it matters will help ensure that the time you do spend on that feedback isn’t going to waste!
References
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (n.d.). How to give feedback. Teaching + Learning Lab. https://tll.mit.edu/teaching-resources/assess-learning/how-to-give-feedback/ Links to an external site.
Pitt, E., & Norton, L. (2017). “Now that”s the feedback I want!” Students’ reactions to feedback on graded work and what they do with it. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 42(4), 499–516. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2016.1142500 Links to an external site.