Effective, Efficient Feedback: Tips & Tools

Picture this: You sit at your desk (or table or couch), pen in hand, a stack beside you. The "stack" consists of student work to be graded and returned. It looks quite daunting, even after you feel as though you've been there for a little while, plugging away and making progress. However, you can't just walk away or rush through the grading process. You have a feeling that tugs at your stomach-perhaps a slight sense of overwhelm at the time-consuming task a hand, but also a pull at your heart to make sure you see the task through and well to give students the feedback they deserve. 

In our current environment, the "stack" has evolved into an ever-scrolling list of "follow-ups" and "to-do tasks" in our learning management system, itslearning. It may resemble emails of shared Google files. It may also be present itself as unread message notifications as soon as you sign in. Our current virtual situation has flipped our traditional feedback process upside down and may have muddied the waters on how we can best deliver effective feedback virtually. In either scenario, paper or digital, despite the workload, you feel a commitment to make sure the grading is finished to the best of your ability because feedback is important. 

But providing feedback isn't always easy. Nor, does it always seem impactful. At some point in time, you've probably handed back assignments only to notice some of them in the trash bin a few minutes later, despite the hours it took to get to the point to hand the graded assignments back.

How can we provide effective, efficient feedback when our learning environment has been turned upside down?

Why do we spend so much time giving feedback in the first place?

Why:

Providing feedback works. Feedback is meaningful. While this may not be new information, it is essential to note the actual, significant impact feedback has on learning. Leading education researchers John Hattie and Helen Timperley (2007) argue that feedback is one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement. We give verbal and nonverbal feedback regularly without even realizing it. Feedback helps us learn important life skills, such as how to eat, walk, talk, run.

In terms of Universal Design for Learning, feedback is an essential aspect in nearly all aspects of the UDL guidelines. 

• Feedback can help boost and sustain engagement. Feedback helps motivate learners, so they are engaged and ready to learn. It helps encourage learners to persist towards a goal, monitor their progress, and support planning and strategy development. 
  
  
• Feedback can help aid comprehension (representation).
• A student who may have struggled in their first attempt may find success after adapting based upon feedback from the teacher. Furthermore, accessible feedback presented in multiple modalities (audio, video, text) can support understanding across languages.
  
  
• Feedback fosters the development of advanced executive functioning skills.
• Feedback can help provide scaffolding to learners as they develop skills and new knowledge. Furthermore, feedback provides students with an executive "game plan" on what to do next so they are better able to develop metacognitive awareness and processes independently for the future.

Feedback is essential but also time-consuming. How can we make it better, efficient, and more effective? Not all forms and modalities of feedback are created equal, nor do students receive feedback the same. Odds are, we do not intend for our feedback to have adverse effects.Consider the tips below so we may address learner variability in terms of providing feedback in the learning environment.

The How:

1. Timely, Real-Time Feedback with Real-Time Results

Incorporate formative assessments with automatic, real-time results in lessons to provide students with timely feedback so they can quickly adjust and improve. Consider-if you have ever played games like Tetris, Angry Birds, or Guitar Hero, the feedback is immediate, and you get the opportunity to receive and learn from the input to advance to the next level. Through adding automated formative assessments into our lessons, our students can develop an ability to adjust in light of feedback in an efficient way that also saves teachers time. Not all of our lesson content is at the upper level of Bloom's taxonomy. Automated formative assessments provide our students with an opportunity to review basic information while also receiving helpful feedback to guide their understanding. 

Real-time feedback tools:

• Pear Deck: Insert formative assessment, reflection, and other question types directly into your slideshow presentations with Pear Deck to provide your students with instant opportunities to check for understanding, ask questions, and receive feedback upon their performance. 
• BCSC currently has the premium version of Pear Deck available to all teachers until June!
  
  
• Go Formative: Go Formative (also known as Formative), is, as the name implies, a formative assessment tool with a variety of question and response types. Build your assessments from scratch or select from a library of standard-aligned questiones. Use the "whiteboard" question type to provide your students flexible options to showcase their understanding (draw, insert an image, text, video). You can automate grading to provide students with instant results. Math teachers, you won't want to miss out on this tool-it includes features (charts, graphs, equation editors) specifically designed to support math instruction.
• BCSC currently has the premium version of Go Formative available to all teachers until late June!
  
  
• Kahoot, Quizlet, Quizizz (review games): Quick review games are excellent ways to check for understanding efficiently while also providing students with results quickly. Review games save you time, and gives students the feedback in the moment they need it. Save yourself time by pulling questions from libraries or by asking students to submit their own questions to be included in the review game!
• BCSC currently has the premium version of Kahoot available to all teachers until late June!

2. Short, goal-referenced feedback

Feedback isn't the most helpful if it is too overwhelming. If we provide too much feedback at once-or too many fixes for our students to make-it can overwhelm them by overloading their cognitive load. Too many adjustments, repairs, and suggestions at once can surpass the amount of new information our students can hold in their working memory, which has limits. According to researchers, our working memory has a limit of 4-7 new pieces of information it can process at one time-otherwise known as cognitive load. When we reach cognitive overload, our brain cannot handle any further information, whether we want to or not. When designing our feedback, we need to provide short, actionable, goal-referenced tips to our students. While we may want to give lots of fixes at once to be helpful to our students because, as teachers, we are inherently fixers who wish to see our students succeed, we may be causing more harm than good if we try to give them all of the fixes at once. Providing a few actionable suggestions in one sitting provides our learners with tangible next steps without overloading their brains. Plus-short feedback can help save teacher time (and sanity) as well.

3. Provide accessible feedback (options)

Just as overwhelming feedback is not the most helpful, unclear, inaccessible feedback is unhelpful. When providing feedback, the feedback needs to be in a language that is clear and understood by the user, and in an accessible modality. Just as our students vary in how they learn and cultural influences play a factor in this, the culture of a student can also influence the understanding of feedback as well as feedback effects. Feedback cannot be provided in a "one-size fits all" approach to yield the best results. Audio, video, or text feedback formats give the learners options in representation to best understand the feedback. Rather than provide a text-only comment, add text and a short audio or video clip. While it may seem time-consuming at first, it will save you time in the end because students will be more likely to understand the feedback when it is presented in multiple modalities. Plus, adding a personal touch, such as your face or voice, can help our students feel more connected in a time where we feel so physically distant from one another. By providing our students with flexible feedback options, we can promote understanding across all languages and ensure all of our students have the tools to monitor their progress towards lesson goals.

Tools for creating more accessible feedback options efficiently:

• Written Feedback:
• Insert comments on Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, etc. for short, goal-referenced tips.
• Use "suggesting mode" in Docs to visually show students where to make revisions, accept edits, and more. Text appears in a different color and draws student attention.

• Audio Feedback:
• Record and insert audio recordings, "Voice Notes", via ReadWrite for Google.

• Video Feedback:
• Insert video comments via the Google Chrome extension Screencastify (webcam option). 
• Bonus tip: Students can reply with their own Screencastify videos as well!

• Pictorial Feedback:
• Encourage and give students a positive boost with personalized, fun feedback by inserting images directly into Slides, Docs, etc.! Think of GIFs and cartoons as the new stickers of the digital era. We all know how much our students love stickers, no matter their age! Plus, adding a personal touch with a GIF or bitmoji helps students feel it is you, who they have a positive relationship with, interacting with them, not just an impersonal computer.
• Andtheniwaslike.co (animated image gifs)
• Bitmoji (cartoon version of yourself)

4. Get feedback (on your feedback)

In an interview, feedback expert John Hattie emphasized that the most powerful feedback is that given from the student to the teacher. To help see learning through the eyes of your students, ask students for their reflections on the feedback you provide. What format/modality helped them understand what to do next? What questions do they still have? In asking for their feedback, we can plan for more effective teaching, learning, and feedback in the future. Ask your students to share feedback via a short Google Form or itslearning message.

For a quick reference of the tips shared here, review the guides below:

Video (YouTube Playlist)

Written Guide

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Photo by Karol Kasanicky on Unsplash

 

CAST, "UDL: Universal Design for Learning Guidelines", The UDL Guidelines (website), accessed April 11, 2020.
http://udlguidelines.cast.org/

Danny Halarewich, "Reducing Cognitive Overload for a Better User Experience", Smashing Magazine (website), accessed April 20, 2020.

Grant Wiggins, "Seven Keys to Effective Feedback", Educational Leadership, Vol. 70 Iss. 1, ACSD (website), accessed May 5, 2020.
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept12/vol70/num01/Seven-Keys-to-Effective-Feedback.aspx

John Hattie, "Feedback in Learning", Visible Learning (website), accessed May 5, 2020.

https://visible-learning.org/2013/10/john-hattie-article-about-feedback-in-schools/