Feedback is for learning
Using feedback to turn evaluation heavy assessment into assessment for learning
Okay, let's say you’ve crafted some amazing assessment that perfectly evidences how well your students have achieved the skills and knowledge you wish to assess. The students do the task and get their marks and feedback. Now what? Will they read the feedback and use it? I'm not talking about the case where someone thinks they should have gotten an 80% rather than 79%. Effective and meaningful feedback is feedback which gets used and changes the learner's practices and beliefs. So how do you make that happen?
Agency and motivation
One of the most powerful steps in learning is connecting with intrinsic motivation (I care about this thing). One of the challenges that often arises in the assessment space is that the focus on evaluation alone and transmutation of student work into a numeric mark directs students into extrinsic motivation (I just want to get a good mark).
In fact there can be serious well-being issues that arise from this focus as learners can end up treating numeric marks as an evaluation of them as a person rather than of a piece of work they have produced. I have had many teary conversations with students trying to disentangle the two and remind them that this is but one episode of learning within a long series and to focus them on what they have learnt from the experience, their new-found goals and how to work towards them. What it has taken me a while to understand, was that my desire to support their well-being has actually been me working in opposition to what the assessment design itself does.
As mentioned intrinsic motivation is key in learning. Universal design for learning captures this as part of the “engagement” aspect and it's powerful for all learners but particularly for marginalised folks who may have been told they can't do a thing more often than they can (eg “maybe science isn't for you?”, “why don't you pick something easier?”, etc). It's also essential for the dopamine-deprived (eg ADHD).
By connecting an assessment to something of interest to the learner, we maximise their engagement with the task and feedback upon it. What might that look like?
Students build a system with features X, Y, Z but they pick the context for that system (eg community wellbeing, green energy, etc)
Students present about a chosen topic from a set with options to negotiate their own personal topic
Students choose a creative format for a poster/infographic/etc for key subject matter (eg a poem, a play, a drawing, a song, etc)
In these cases, students are more interested in the feedback and learning from it as they naturally care about what they just did, it's not simply a “fire and forget”
Product vs process
A common balance spoken about in the assessment design space is between the process and product of learning. The process being that we assess how they've gotten through the assessment, the product being that we assess what they produced from the assessment. It is murkier than one might think as product of one task could easily be the process towards another or the assessment could be a reflective report which is itself an artefact but could be an analysis of one's learning process as well.
Let's look at some other ways to connect students with feedback which draw on a process focus…
Where does it all lead?
Having a task that connects to something in the learner's future creates a purpose for using the task and its feedback after the submission point. There are a few ways to do that but here are three common approaches
Break up an assessment into stages that build together towards a final product (eg a pitch before a prototype)
Align later tasks with the prior tasks so that the skills and knowledge in the completed task explicitly helps with that later task (eg same topic, same format, etc.)
Align assessment tasks to things learners will do after they complete their qualification or overall learning experience (eg a practice job interview)
In each of these, the learner has a clear need to use the feedback from the task as acting on the feedback will improve how they perform in something else.
Feedback as part of assessment
Equally, the assessment regime can make directly analysing or using feedback part of the assessment. If feedback comments received by the learner become the stem or context for other assessment tasks, then engaging with the feedback becomes a natural part of completing the assessment task. Here are a few ways to do that:
Resubmit the task making changes based on feedback received
Reflect on what you would change if you did resubmit
Critique the feedback received
Reflect on what you learned from the feedback
Crucially, the feedback comments learners use could be individual feedback from their teachers but could equally aggregate feedback towards the whole cohort, peer feedback, self-feedback against a rubric or sample work, etc. One consideration I would make with self-feedback is it may be most interesting for students to discuss together or review with a delay so the learner gains new knowledge in between producing and reviewing.
Obligatory side point: bad feedback is still bad
Most of this post is focused around how you can maximise student engagement with feedback but that doesn't work if the feedback is missing the crucial elements that make it meaningful to do so. Feedback still needs to be specific, relevant and actionable. It should also be seen as an ongoing dialogue with learners and that dialogue should happen at a time when learners are ready for it.
Feedback like “you need to work on your eye contact” wouldn’t hit the mark as while it might be ‘about’ the student’s performance it doesn’t give them direction on what improvement is sought with eye contact and how to achieve this.
Equally feedback should be targeted towards the unknowns for our learners. We would naturally expect a junior netball player to need different feedback to those on an Olympic level team. Equally the final year student that keeps messing up their spelling has probably heard it enough times that it’s not adding any value.
A neat strategy around this I heard recently from assessment for learning advocate Phillip Dawson was to get students to:
Suggest the parts of their work they want feedback comments around specifically
self-assess using the same rubric as the teacher with the teacher focusing feedback around areas of disagreement
In the first case, students are sharing what they are least confident about (or most motivated to improve). In the second the disparity in teacher vs student ratings directly uncovers the ‘unknowns’ for the student in both their overestimation and underestimation of performance.