Effective feedback: The key to student success
It is important to give students timely and regular feedback in online courses. It is also important to give students substantive and effective feedback.
- The value of substantive feedback: As online courses continue to grow in higher education, the art of giving effective feedback becomes even more crucial. In the online environment, feedback is how we build relationships, guide development and motivate learners. Feedback also often serves as one of the primary ways instructors practice regular and substantive interaction (RSI), demonstrate presence and cultivate a sense of community in online courses.
- The means of substantive feedback: In addition, digital technologies provide instructors with innovative, efficient and powerful tools for composing and communicating feedback to students. Instead of using red pens on physical papers, instructors can now do far more with technology, including annotations and audio comments in the Canvas Speedgrader, and more.
Sadly, students often don't receive the specific, actionable feedback they need to truly improve their work and learn. “What students crave, and what too often they don’t receive, is feedback specifically designed to help them get better” (Darby, 2019, p. 110).
Let's change that! What does effective feedback look like?
Characteristics of effective feedback
How to give effective feedback:
- Start with clear expectations.
- Balance depth and concision.
- Consider the kind of feedback you are giving.
- Give balanced feedback.
- Personalize the positive and depersonalize the negative.
- Look ahead and not back.
Detailed expectations, often provided by using rubrics, are the foundation of effective feedback. These resources help students know what success looks like and enable more focused, efficient and helpful feedback from you. Rubrics will help you ensure that your feedback is more objective and fair across all student submissions.
While feedback should be detailed enough to be helpful, it should also avoid being overwhelming and containing too much information. Finding this balance will ensure the feedback is efficient yet still effective for students. Sometimes less is more.
As you give feedback to your students, you may like to consider and analyze what kind of feedback you are giving them. Is it simply noting how they did in relation to the rubric, are you probing, clarifying and challenging students’ reasoning, or are you offering suggestions for future improvement? Alvarez, Espasa, and Guasch (2011) noted there are four kinds of feedback we can give our students.
Type of Feedback | Definition | Example |
| Corrective | Focuses on how well the submission is aligned with assignment instructions and rubrics. | “You need to watch out for comma splices in your writing. There were several of them in this essay.” |
| Epistemic | Summons students to engage in more critical thinking and reflection about their work and reasoning. | “What tools or strategies do you currently use to review and check your grammar and mechanics?” |
| Suggestive | Offers advice and suggestions for how to improve in the future. | “You may like to use Grammarly, read your writing aloud or ask someone else to read your work in the future. These strategies may help you catch and fix grammatical concerns you may otherwise overlook.” |
| Epistemic + suggestive | Both summon students to engage in more critical thinking and reflection about their work and reasoning and offer advice and suggestions for how to improve in the future. | “What tools or strategies could you use in the future to check your grammar and mechanics? You could use Grammarly, read your writing aloud or read your work in the future. What would work best for you?” |
Research has found that epistemic + suggestive feedback is most impactful and useful for students (Alvarez, Espasa, and Guasch, 2011). Such feedback gives students “food for future thought,” inviting them to both reflect on their learning and the material and to look ahead to the future.
Students like to know not only where they have done well already but also where they could do better in the future. Such balanced feedback supports students in their learning and encourages a growth mindset. To offer such balanced feedback, you may like to use the praise, questions and suggestions (PQS) framework.
- Praise: Recognize and celebrate what the student has done well.
- Questions: Share questions or concerns you had as the audience.
- Suggestions: Offer ideas and steps the student can take to do better in the future.
You could also keep the principles of writing a “negative message” (Williams & Smith, 2020) in mind as you give feedback. Delivering negative news, whether using a direct or indirect approach, should be delivered clearly and concisely with respect for the receiver.
When phrasing your feedback, you could personalize positive comments directly to the learner but depersonalize suggestions for improvement. If the student has done something well, center him or her in your comments and say something like, “You have provided some authoritative and compelling sources to support your argument.”
However, if there is an area for improvement, try to reduce the presence of the student in your language: Instead of focusing on the student and saying things like "you need to...", you could instead focus on the hypothetical audience or the work itself. You could say, "You are off to a great start, but the reader may wonder about…" This subtle shift protects learners' feelings while focusing on the experience of the audience or future improvements.
Your comments should look ahead and not back. Effective and constructive feedback does not concentrate on what a student has done wrong in previous work. Instead, it looks ahead to what the student could do better in the future. As you give feedback to students, focus on the most salient or essential items and offer concrete and specific suggestions that emphasize what the student could do better or differently in the future. This approach will empower students with the steps they need to take to improve.
Formats for effective feedback
As you consider the characteristics of effective feedback, you may also wonder: How can students receive that feedback? Feedback can come in myriad ways!
Multimodal feedback
Audio and video feedback options are now possible with technology, and research is finding the benefits of using multimedia to give feedback.
- Student preference: Students prefer multimodal feedback and value the personalization and in-depth explanations possible with these formats (Cunningham, 2018; Dalton, 2018; Portolese Dias and Trumpy, 2014; Rawle et al., 2018; West & Turner, 2016).
- More polite language: Research has also indicated that audio or video feedback tends to feature more polite language than written feedback: Instructors tend to engage in more hedging, using fewer necessity modal verbs (must, have to, should, etc.) and more first-person pronouns (I, me, my) (Cunningham, 2018; Cunningham & Link, 2021; and Dalton, 2018). This more polite language causes feedback to sound less “top-down” and more “side-to-side” to students.
With multimodal feedback, “the students’ perspective on and attitude toward feedback may shift: He or she may come to see it not as criticism from above but rather as collaboration and conversation from alongside” (Wilkins, 2023, p. 16). To implement the use of audio or video feedback, you can use the following strategies within Canvas SpeedGrader:
- Upload media.
- Record media.
Accessible feedback
If you do decide to record audio or video feedback, you may like to check with each student individually through a survey about their preferred format. Some students could need or prefer written feedback. In addition, you could take the time to create captions and transcripts for inclusive feedback that aligns with Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The speech recognition feature in the Canvas SpeedGrader or the “Dictate” feature in Microsoft 365 can support you in this area.
Asynchronous or synchronous feedback
Synchronous (live) feedback options like virtual conferences can offer students and you a warmer and more personal experience by offering immediate clarification and relationship-building. This approach does demand considerable time and may require some scheduling logistics, especially for primarily asynchronous courses. Consider the ideal mix of synchronous and asynchronous feedback for you and your students. Formative assessments, such as rough drafts or scaffolded assignments, may work well with synchronous meetings with students.
Individual and group feedback
Individualized feedback strengthens that one-on-one connection. However, well-crafted announcements or discussion forums offering feedback to the class as a whole have value too! This facilitates shared learning, models how to analyze work, and demonstrates your presence and engagement with students.
To do this, you may first like to review several submissions from students without responding or giving any feedback: Doing so will help you identify common themes and trends. You can then use a whole-class announcement to note major patterns but then provide students with individualized feedback on unique concerns.
Feedback: Your key to student growth and instructor presence
Feedback plays an essential and pivotal role in online courses. “Feedback is an important intervention for the online educator because it is an opportunity to develop the instructor-learner relationship, improve academic performance, and enhance learning” (Leibold & Schwarz, 2015, p. 36). Giving effective feedback is a skill, honed over time with practice. Commit to continuous improvement with each student and each course. Your investment in quality feedback will pay off with increased instructor presence, engaged learners, deeper learning and enhanced growth.
Related Resources
Developing a plan for feedback
References
Alvarez, I., Espasa, A., & Guasch, T. (2011). The value of feedback in improving collaborative writing assignments in an online learning environment. Studies in Higher Education, 37(4), 387-400. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2010.510182
Cunningham, K.J. (2018). Modes of feedback in ESL writing: Implications of shifting from text to screencast [Doctoral dissertation, Iowa State University of Science and Technology]. Iowa State University Digital Repository. https://doi.org/10.31274/etd-180810-5966
Cunningham, K.J., & Link, S. (2021). Video and text feedback on ESL writing: Understanding ATTITUDE and negotiating relationships. Journal of Second Language Writing, 52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2021.100797
Dalton, Z. (2018). The discourse of written and audio feedback [Master’s thesis, Central Washington University]. ScholarWorks@CWU. https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/etd/886/
Darby, F. (2019). Small teaching online: Applying learning science to online classes. Jossey-Bass.
Leibold, N., & Schwarz, L.M. (2015). The art of giving online feedback. The Journal of Effective Teaching, 15(1), 34-46. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1060438.pdf
Portolese Dias, L., & Trumpy, R. (2014). Online instructor’s use of audio feedback to increase social presence and student satisfaction. The Journal of Educators Online, 11(2). https://digitalcommons.cwu.edu/cepsfac/264/
Rawle, T., Thuna, M., Zhao, T., & Kaler, M. (2018). Audio feedback: Student and teaching assistant perspectives on an alternative mode of feedback for written assignments. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 9(2). https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1192633
West, J., & Turner, W. (2016). Enhancing the assessment experience: Improving student perceptions, engagement and understanding using online video feedback. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 53(4). https://doi.org/10.1080/14703297.2014.1003954
Wilkins, K. (2023). Students’ reactions to multimodal feedback and the causes thereof: A literature review [Literature review, Anderson University]. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.26292.83842
Williams, V., & Smith, J. (2020). Chapter 8: Negative messages. In V. Williams (Ed.), Fundamentals of business communication. BCampus. https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/businesswritingessentials/chapter/8-3-negative-messages/
Created on August 26, 2024