by Rachel Goh
This is an excerpt from the introductory chapter of the book “Designing Quality Assessment Feedback Practices in Schools”.
“Class, I’ve marked your essays and given you comments,” announces the teacher. Restless murmuring fills the classroom as students collect back their assignments in dreary anticipation of corrections to be done. “Luckily, I passed,” exclaims a student, heaving a sigh of relief. A few students scrutinize their papers, seemingly trying hard to decipher the teacher’s handwriting. Others browse quickly through the written comments, satisfied that they’ve understood the teacher’s feedback.
How would you want your students to receive and respond to feedback comments?
Knowing what feedback should do for students’ learning hinges on understanding its role in Assessment for Learning (AfL). AfL has been defined in the MOE Assessment Glossary as “assessment that supports teaching and learning with specific use of learner-centred approaches and strategies. It is primarily used for ensuring (emphasis mine) that the intended learning outcomes are achieved by students” (Ministry of Education Singapore, 2017).
This article seeks to clarify what feedback should do for students’ learning by introducing three Big Ideas of effective feedback:
What is your idea of effective assessment feedback practice? Read the following examples and pen down what would make the feedback practice more effective.
Contributed by Teo Guat Soon
Part A: Description of assessment challenge
Knowing what feedback should do for students’ learning hinges on understanding its role in Assessment for Learning (AfL). AfL has been defined in the MOE Assessment Glossary as “assessment that supports teaching and learning with specific use of learner-centred approaches and strategies. It is primarily used for ensuring (emphasis mine) that the intended learning outcomes are achieved by students” (Ministry of Education Singapore, 2017).
This article seeks to clarify what feedback should do for students’ learning by introducing three Big Ideas of effective feedback:
- Effective feedback should help students find and fix their learning gap.
- Effective feedback should make students want and be good enough to fix their gap.
- Effective feedback should persuade students to go beyond fixes and gaps.
What is your idea of effective assessment feedback practice? Read the following examples and pen down what would make the feedback practice more effective.
Example 1.1
Subject/Topic/Level: Science/Food chains and food web/Primary 6Contributed by Teo Guat Soon
Part A: Description of assessment challenge
From the analysis of students’ responses, two Issues were observed. For part (a), students were not able to give an explanation to support their choice of a food producer. For part (b), students failed to state what “affected” meant and did not make a distinction between the terms “main food source” and “only food source” in their reasoning.
Part B: Description of assessment feedback practice
The teacher collected the students’ assignments and selected a few responses that were representative of student misconceptions and/or poor conceptual reasoning. The next lesson, she gave each student a copy of the collated unmarked samples of anonymised students’ answers. As part of a whole class discussion, she got students to compare the selected samples, and notice wrong concept(s) or wrong term(s) used, and the evidence of a lack of conceptual reasoning. As the teacher elicited and consolidated the learning points, the students took notes of their specific gaps on the worksheet. Finally, the teacher got the students to work on their refined answer. The teacher marked the refined answers with ticks to annotate the gaps that were closed, and with crosses and cues to highlight gaps that students still need to address. Example 1.1.2 illustrates the feedback provided.
Part B: Description of assessment feedback practice
The teacher collected the students’ assignments and selected a few responses that were representative of student misconceptions and/or poor conceptual reasoning. The next lesson, she gave each student a copy of the collated unmarked samples of anonymised students’ answers. As part of a whole class discussion, she got students to compare the selected samples, and notice wrong concept(s) or wrong term(s) used, and the evidence of a lack of conceptual reasoning. As the teacher elicited and consolidated the learning points, the students took notes of their specific gaps on the worksheet. Finally, the teacher got the students to work on their refined answer. The teacher marked the refined answers with ticks to annotate the gaps that were closed, and with crosses and cues to highlight gaps that students still need to address. Example 1.1.2 illustrates the feedback provided.
The teacher had moved away from the typical practice of marking students’ assignments, going through the answers in class, and getting students to copy down the model answer as corrections. She has instead taken effort to select weak and stronger exemplars of students’ work and have them make judgement on how well the answers have addressed the question requirements. Unpacking the criteria of good performance also enabled students to compare them against their own answers to address their own specific learning gaps. This example illustrates that there is a critical difference between giving feedback and feedback as practice. Feedback as practice moves from the act of teacher telling students all their mistakes toward the co-construction of knowledge through showing and concluding.
Big Idea 1: The key to effective feedback is helping students find and fix their learning gap.
What should feedback do for student learning? Assessment feedback should help all students find and fix their learning gap. Assessment feedback should help develop students’ capacity to make judgement and take requisite action. Helping students find and fix their learning gap will ensure that they develop the capacity to make judgement and utilize feedback for improvement.
What should feedback do for student learning? Assessment feedback should help all students find and fix their learning gap. Assessment feedback should help develop students’ capacity to make judgement and take requisite action. Helping students find and fix their learning gap will ensure that they develop the capacity to make judgement and utilize feedback for improvement.
Example 1.2
Subject/Focus: Chinese Language/SpellingContributed by Tay Choon Hong
Part A: Description of assessment challenge
The motivation to learn Chinese can be low for some students due to the fact that their preferred mode of communication is through English. The strokes of Chinese characters are also relatively more difficult to master. Some students are also easily content with what they have achieved. They are not motivated to put in more effort in their work. What should the teacher do? (a) Tell the students what their weaknesses are without reservations, or (b) Tell the student what they are capable of achieving. Which one is a better choice for motivating the student to improve?
Part B: Description of assessment feedback practice
The answer to the above question about the teacher’s necessary action seems pretty obvious. The teacher was cognizant that feedback comments could influence students’ self-perception of their competence and shape their beliefs about their learning ability. It led him to want to practise positive feedback so that students would be more willing to act on the feedback. Example 1.2.1 and Example 1.2.2 shows the teacher’s comments to a student on his performance across two spelling tests. He had noticed from previous spelling tests that the student tended to make careless mistakes in writing the strokes for the Chinese characters so he wrote a comment to have the student see him to address this concern, which the student eventually did. The teacher continued practising positive feedback in the next spelling test as shown in Example 1.2.2 by encouraging the student to continue to apply the method taught so that he could achieve his best performance.
The teacher reflected that in his past feedback practice, there was a tendency to focus on the weaknesses of students instead of their potential. Adopting a formative assessment mindset helped in shifting attention to what students could potentially do. While acknowledging that writing such comments can be time consuming, the capital investment has yielded benefits for students in terms of a greater motivation to learn. The teacher described what has been helpful in practising positive feedback: (a) Thinking from the perspective of the learner: How are they likely to react to the written/verbal feedback; (b) Including comments with a positive connotation to try again instead of merely directing students to do corrections; and (c) Giving students a concrete opportunity to act on the feedback.
Big Idea 2: The key to effective feedback is making students want and be good enough to fix their gap.
What should feedback do for students’ learning? Assessment feedback should make all students want and be good enough to fix their learning gap. Assessment feedback should build students’ motivation and ability to use feedback to enhance learning for the long term. Making students want and be good enough to fix their gap will build their will and skill in receiving and responding to feedback for sustainable learning.
What should feedback do for students’ learning? Assessment feedback should make all students want and be good enough to fix their learning gap. Assessment feedback should build students’ motivation and ability to use feedback to enhance learning for the long term. Making students want and be good enough to fix their gap will build their will and skill in receiving and responding to feedback for sustainable learning.
Example 1.3
Subject/Topic/Level: Mathematics/Linear Law/Secondary 3Contributed by Lee Chin Hock
Part A: Description of assessment challenge
A procedural understanding is required in the learning of Linear Law in mathematics. This is likewise in the learning of other subjects such as process skills in Science. Teachers will usually teach the concept and then use examples to demonstrate the steps to solve the questions. However, some students still encounter difficulty in solving such questions involving procedural understanding. In this case, the teacher noticed three common mistakes that students make in answering questions involving Linear Law: (a) Students encounter difficulty in joining all the points to plot the linear graph when most points are not nicely collinear; (b) Students do not extend the line to cut the vertical axis and as such, they are unable to find the Y- intercept; and (c) Students forget to replace Y and X with the actual labels of the axes instead they assume Y = y.
Part B: Description of assessment feedback practice
The teacher wanted to help students develop a checklist to guide their procedural thinking. By then, students were familiar with the conversion of a linear form to a non-linear equation. The learning focus was to help students with conversion of a non-linear form to a linear equation. He began at the feed up stage, using a question on converting a linear form to a non-linear graph to help students recall the procedural steps. He elicited students’ responses to draw up a checklist for the procedure. This helped students understand what a good checklist would involve. Using another question, the teacher demonstrated the steps involved in converting a non-linear form to a linear equation. Students were asked to create a checklist of the steps involved on their own. They could refer to the first checklist as needed. Selected students were then invited to present their checklist to the class for feedback. Through questions posed by the teacher as feedback, the presenting students were able to revise their checklist, and the ensuing class discussion also prompted other students to compare their checklist with those presented to identify and close the gaps in their procedure. A student-generated checklist is shown in Example 1.3.1.
Later, an opportunity to transfer their learning to another topic was created. Students were asked to create a checklist on plotting a cumulative frequency curve. By then, they were able to do it independently without additional instructional scaffolding and a combination of peer feedback and teacher feedback could be employed.
How did the three Big Ideas connect-extend-challenge your thinking on what would make the feedback practice more effective? Share your thoughts with us in the AFAL community on this Padlet https://padlet.com/AFAL/BigIdeas
Big Idea 3: The key to effective feedback is persuading students to go beyond fixes and gaps.
What should feedback do for students’ learning? Assessment feedback should persuade students to go beyond corrections in moving their learning forward. Assessment feedback should develop students to become self-regulated learners, capable of monitoring their learning in the long term. Persuading students to go beyond fixes and gaps will help develop their self-regulation for learning in and beyond the classroom.
What should feedback do for students’ learning? Assessment feedback should persuade students to go beyond corrections in moving their learning forward. Assessment feedback should develop students to become self-regulated learners, capable of monitoring their learning in the long term. Persuading students to go beyond fixes and gaps will help develop their self-regulation for learning in and beyond the classroom.
How did the three Big Ideas connect-extend-challenge your thinking on what would make the feedback practice more effective? Share your thoughts with us in the AFAL community on this Padlet https://padlet.com/AFAL/BigIdeas