Student Engagement with Feedback:
Feeding Up instead of Getting “Fed Up” with Giving your Students Feedback
by Koh-Ng Yui Yun
Brennan Kwa
Shirley Yeo-Tham
(Edgefield Secondary School)
The search for effective feedback strategies has been the focus of the English Language teachers in Edgefield Secondary School since 2020. During department meetings, discussions on marking effectiveness had focused on the use of band descriptors, detailed comments and marking symbols to improve student achievement. The opportunity to work with NIE to examine our feedback pedagogy proved helpful and insightful. We learnt from local research that EL teachers were giving copious amounts of feedback on students' work, however, there was limited uptake of the feedback by the students to improve their work because students may have issues digesting the comments made and be overwhelmed by their many grammatical errors.
The transferability of feedback became the focus of discussion for the English Language department during the Professional Learning Team (PLT) sessions. In 2021, a group of teachers looked into the factors that have influenced students’ transference of learning and motivation to apply teacher feedback to revise their work. The study examined the affective, behavioural and cognitive dimensions of the students’ feedback engagement. EL teachers’ beliefs on student engagement with feedback and how they impact the transference of learning were considered. Teachers opined that encouraging student voices, views and metacognition was essential in the feedback process:
Feedback as a pedagogy needs to be
- underpinned by positive teacher-student relationships of trust and patience;
- routinised, multifaceted, and manageable for better uptake of feedback;
- formative, iterative, concise and specific before it can impact the transference of learning
Students need to
- see feedback as a tool for improvement;
- be motivated to engage with feedback and work on their revisions
- appreciate feedback
Teachers from the PLT set out to explore student engagement with feedback at the Secondary 1 level with Essay Writing. Teachers from the PLT continued to enhance feedback pedagogy at the Secondary 2 level with Situational Writing and at the Secondary 4 level with Literature essays, improving on feedback practices applied since 2020.
Rethinking Student Engagement with Feedback: Secondary 1 Express English Language Essay writing
Teachers involved in the PLT in 2021 experimented with the use of rubrics as a starting point to surface anticipated learning gaps of two Sec 1 classes. It was hoped that the rubrics would help students realise their language gaps: language accuracy, verb forms and punctuation. With this realisation, it would lead to their desire to self-regulate and an undertaking to improve their writing skills. Ultimately, students would be motivated to receive feedback from their teachers, respond to the feedback by revising their work and applying their learning on future written pieces of work.
With the Sec 1 classes, students’ engagement with feedback began with their understanding that good writing involves being mindful of organisation, paragraphing, content and language accuracy in the different parts of speech in the English language. To guide students in their success criteria for continuous writing, a set of rubrics was created by adapting the UCLES assessment rubric. Teachers focused on content and relevance, together with paragraphing to help students write coherent argumentative essays.
Watch this video to learn about the enhanced feedback practice designed to encourage students’ uptake of feedback in the Sec 1 EL classroom.
The Situation with Situational Writing: Secondary 2 Express English Language
In our Secondary 2 English Language classes, for Situational Writing, students often grapple with having a clear understanding of the situational writing rubrics and how to make use of the comments and feedback provided in their scripts.
Oftentimes even after copious annotations and markings on the scripts, most students, when submitting another piece of situational writing, would repeat the same mistakes that had been earlier pointed out.
Recognising that gap, we created a checklist of the marking codes and an explanation of the comments and rubrics. So when students received their marked situational writing pieces, they would have to go through the checklist and rubrics and understand the comments given. This would then culminate in a self-evaluation form on their scripts to identify the areas for improvement in their work.
The gratifying aspect of this particular project was that teachers were actually able to respond to students’ feedback in their self-evaluation, making a previously monological process, a dialogical one instead.
Watch this video to learn about how the teacher promoted dialogic feedback in the Sec 2 EL classroom.
Making Meaning of Literature: Self-Evaluation and “No Marks” Essay Scripts
It is not atypical for our Secondary 4 Literature students (or really any student regardless of level or stream) to loudly exclaim upon receipt of their scripts, “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong” or (I’d argue even worse) “I don’t know what the teacher is saying in the comments!”.
For Literature, this is an especially worrisome trend because marking of their scripts is done via Rubrics so how they get their marks can at times seem subjective and opaque to them.
One of the big reasons behind their lack of understanding or knowledge of how to manage and better understand the comments and rubrics in their scripts, comes from a lack of self-evaluation and reflection of their writing and their essays.
Self-Evaluation of Student Work
In the context of this project, self-evaluation would be how students make a concerted effort to look through their work and make a judgement about their work and what is present, what is missing and how that translates into quantifying and placing their work on the scoring rubrics.
Self-Reflection and how to improve
After the initial stage of evaluating their work (to look through and take note of what is present and what is missing), the next step that we wanted our students to take would be to reflect on their work and determine how it can be understood, revised and improved in the next iteration. We would argue that students can only improve if they are first able to evaluate on their own mistakes before they move onto the deeper and more demanding stage of reflecting on how to improve.
Example of the self-evaluation and reflection spreadsheet:
Note: The self-evaluation component would be under the column Rationale for Marks while the reflection component would be under the column Improvement to essay.
To that end, we put in place the following measures for our Sec 4 Literature students when returning their scripts to them:
- Self-evaluation & Reflection of their Scripts (Annex B Tab 1-Self-Evaluation): Students, after getting back their respective assignments or exam scripts, would have to access a spreadsheet in their Google Classroom and evaluate their scripts based upon marks. They would have to explain the reason for their marks and how they would improve in the next assignment.
- “No Mark” Scripts (Annex B Tab 2-No Mark Scripts): Students’ scripts would not be given a mark, instead the teacher would have recorded the mark on a separate list. Students would only be able to look at the comments and annotations on their scripts and use that to guide them in determining the mark they would potentially have scored. After students completed this self-marking process, the teacher would reveal the mark that was allocated to them.
Watch this video to learn how the teacher designed processes that made students pay attention to the written feedback, self-assess their performance and receive feedback to calibrate their self-assessment.
Future Directions
Several implications on the sustainability of the enhanced feedback pedagogy (establishing standards, noticing gaps and applying feedback to the next task) were discussed within the department. Teachers agreed that it was important for students to make sense of and apply feedback as it would most likely translate to improved writing skills. The teachers also noticed that students were most encouraged to engage with the feedback if it was specific and concise. The teachers’ reflection made them more cognisant about the clarity and specificity of comments in the feedback, and providing opportunities for students to read the feedback in class and seek clarifications.
In order to make time and facilitate some of these practices, teachers agreed that they could focus on using the enhanced feedback pedagogy when teaching students how to use the parts of speech more accurately for continuous writing. Teachers could also focus on bite-sized paragraphs instead of whole essays, thereby making the writing revisions more manageable and less onerous for students. For the advanced learners, teachers could move students towards more self-regulation in terms of engaging in self and peer feedback when analysing their own writing before getting teachers’ input. These practices would lead to teachers engaging with more feed up practices rather than getting fed-up with students’ lack of action in feedback engagement.