UNPACKING STRATEGY 3
Effective Feedback
Read the following excerpt from John Hattie’s article, Feedback in Schools (Hattie, 2011).
Effective feedback helps students answer these questions:
Where Am I going? The first question relates to goals. When students understand their goals and what success of those goals look like, then the feedback is more powerful. Without them feedback is often confusing, disorienting, and interpreted as something about the student not their tasks or work. There are two major elements of goals, these are challenge and commitment. Challenging goals relate to feedback in two major ways. First, they inform individuals “as to what type or level of performance is to be attained so that they can direct and evaluate their actions and efforts accordingly. Feedback allows them to set reasonable goals and to track their performance in relation to their goals so that adjustments in effort, direction, and even strategy can be made as needed” (Locke & Latham, 1990, p. 23). These levels of attainment can be termed success criteria. Goal commitment, which refers to one’s attachment or determination to reach a goal, has a direct and often secondary impact on goal performance. There are many mediators that can affect goal commitment and among the more important are peers, who can influence goal commitment through pressure, modeling, and competition, and particularly during adolescence the reputation desired by the student can very much affect the power of this peer influence (Carroll, Houghton, Durkin, & Hattie, 2009).
How am I going? The second question is more related to progress feedback (How Am I Going?). This entails feedback (about past, present or how to progress) relative to the starting or finishing point and is often expressed in relation to some expected standard, to prior performance, and/or to success or failure on a specific part of the task. Feedback information about progress, about personal best performance, and comparative effects to other students can be most salient to this second question.
Where to next? The third question is more consequential, Where to next? Such feedback can assist in choosing the next most appropriate challenges, more self-regulation over the learning process, greater fluency and automaticity, different strategies and processes to work on the tasks, deeper understanding, and more information about what is and what is not understood.
Keys to Effective Feedback
Goal Referenced
What is the learning target you are giving the feedback around?
There is only feedback if a person has a goal, takes actions to achieve the goal, and gets goal-related information fed back. To talk of feedback, in other words, is to refer to some notable consequence of one’s actions, in light of an intent.
Tangible and Transparent
Is the feedback given neutrally, and is it something that the student can see or hear?
Any useful feedback system involves not only a clear goal, but transparent and tangible results related to the goal. Feedback to students (and teachers!) needs to be as concrete and obvious as the laughter or its absence is to the comedian and the hit or miss is to the Little League batter.
Actionable Information
What can the student do because of the feedback?
Feedback is actionable information; data or facts that you can use to improve on your own since you likely missed something in the heat of the moment. No praise, no blame, no value judgment, helpful facts. I hear when they laugh and when they don’t; I adjust my jokes accordingly.
User-friendly
Is the language and learning target appropriate for the student?
Feedback is not of much value if the user cannot understand it or is overwhelmed by it, even if it is accurate in the eyes of experts or bystanders.
Timely
Is feedback given as the student is working, not after they are finished?
The sooner I get feedback, then, the better (in most cases). I don’t want to wait hours or days to find out which jokes they laughed at or didn’t, whether my students were attentive, or which part of my paper works and doesn’t. My caveat, “in most cases”, is meant to cover situations such as playing a piano piece in recital: I don’t want either my teacher or the audience to be barking out feedback as I perform. That’s why it is more precise to say that good feedback is “timely” rather than “immediate.”
Ongoing
Is the student given more feedback the next time they are working on the same skill?
It follows that the more the student can get such timely feedback, in real time, before it is too late, the better the student’s ultimate performance will be, especially on complex performance that can never be mastered in a short amount of time and on a few attempts. That’s why we talk about powerful feedback “loops” in a sound learning system.
Consistent
Is language consistent from student to student, teacher to student?
For feedback to be useful it has to be consistent. Clearly, I can only monitor and adjust successfully if the information fed back to me is stable, unvarying in its accuracy, and trustworthy. In education this has a clear consequence: teachers have to be on the same page about what is quality work and what to say when the work is not up to standard. This can only come from teachers constantly looking at student work together, becoming more consistent (i.e. achieving inter-rater reliability) over time, and formalizing their judgments in highly-descriptive rubrics supported by anchor products and performances. If we want student-to-student feedback to be more helpful, students have to be trained the same way we train teachers to be consistent, using the same exemplars and rubrics.
Read more about the Wiggins’ 7 Keys to Effective Feedback here.
Use this worksheet to note some examples of feedback you have given students that fall in each of the 7 keys.
Amount of Feedback
There is such a thing as too much feedback. Adapted from: Brookhart, S. M. (2008).
- Selecting two to three main points about a paper for comment
- Giving feedback on important learning targets
- Commenting on at least as many strengths as weaknesses
- Returning a student’s paper with every error in mechanics edited
- Writing comments on a paper that are longer than the paper itself
- Writing lots of comments on poor quality papers and almost nothing on good-quality papers