Principle 3: Give students practice in 'generating feedback for self and for others'

To what extent do students in your course have explicit opportunities to generate feedback about academic work, their own or that of their peers?

Why?

  1. students are generating feedback all the time as they regulate their own learning, so it makes sense to build on this capability so that they become better at self-regulation
  2. teachers only provide advice/comments - to become feedback the student must compare this information with the work they have produced. So the key to improving feedback is to create many opportunities for students' themselves to generate it.
  3. having opportunities to make multiple comparisons can increase students learning without any increase in teacher workload.  
  4. generating feedback for peers is especially valuable as it not only develops the students' ability to make judgements about the work of others but it also results in students making reflective comparisons and generating feedback on their own work.  
  5. producing feedback for others is a graduate skill required in professional practice but it is not usually deliberately practiced in higher education.

How to begin

  1. ask students to compare their own work with some reference items when they hand it in and write a report
  2. students can make comparisons of their work with (i) the task requirements and the criteria (ii) exemplars (iii) the work of peers (iv) a summary set of feedback provided by the teacher to the class (iv) a discussion held in class about the quality of such works or about the processes of production. In all cases students should make explicit what they are getting from these comparisons through a verbal or a written report
  3. This need not take time. Here is an adaption of the one-minute paper idea. Have students at the end of a lecture write a short explanation of a complex topic perhaps going beyond exactly what was discussed in the lecture. The students hand them in as they leave class. The teacher scans them and if many are not so good at the beginning of the next lecture she asks students to get in groups and do the same task again.  In doing this, the students will naturally compare what they wrote before with the discussion in the group and the way the group constructs the written output. This comparison will generate a lot of internal feedback, over and above what occurs through the verbal discussion.
  4. Sequence evaluations of peer work so that students carry out reviews of another's work and then a written self-review of their own. The following questions have proved useful (i) how does the work you are reviewing differ from your own work? (ii) what did you learn from these differences? and (iii) which is better your work or the one you reviewed? Give a reason for your answer. You will see that students learn from evaluting poor quality as well as high quality works.
  5. Invent your own - also see resources here

Add Content...