Blog of the Week: 7 June 2019 – Is the Feedback You’re Giving Students Helping or Hindering?

In 38% of well-designed studies, feedback actually made performance worse—one of the most counterintuitive results in all of psychology.

If there’s a single principle teachers need to digest about classroom feedback, it’s this: The only thing that matters is what students do with it. No matter how well the feedback is designed, if students do not use the feedback to move their own learning forward, it’s a waste of time. We can debate about whether feedback should be descriptive or evaluative, but it is absolutely essential that feedback is productive.

Add to that concept a second related principle: Feedback should be more work for the student than it is for the teacher. Teachers who internalize and practice feedback based on these precepts will be well on their way to teaching that improves learning.

What the Studies Say

In their review of feedback studies conducted between 1905 and 1995, Kluger and DeNisi (1996) found that in 38% of well-designed studies, feedback actually made performance worse—one of the most counterintuitive results in all of psychology.

Let’s examine what must be the oldest and most common forms of feedback in public education: grades, rankings, and written teacher comments on tests and papers. Letter or numerical grades on papers give students information about their current performance. Class rankings give students information about their performance compared to …

 

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Blog of the Week: 16 March 2018 – Marking Crib Sheet

Recently, I have been looking at our departments marking procedures and how best to be effective markers (obviously reducing workload is key!).

I designed this crib sheet as a way to provide quicker feedback to the whole classroom rather than writing comments in each book, so reducing marking time from 2-3 hours per class to less than an hour. Now I actually really do miss writing comments, leaving questions and the other bits in their books but it really wasn’t a workload issue I could continue with (especially as I have my first child on the way!).

Therefore the crib sheet allows me to go through each students’ book and I make comments on the whole class sheet using the sections below.

The benefits are that it gives me a snapshot of the whole class’s progress, allows me to…

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Blog of the Week: 3 January 2018 – Rethinking marking and feedback. It’s all about the response.

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At HGS we’ve been thinking hard about how to make sure teacher feedback has maximum impact and, recently, I’ve been revisiting some blog posts that continue to inform my thoughts on this important area:

‘Close the Gap’ Marking:  a whole-school approach used at Saffron Walden High School, focusing all feedback on student response.

Marking in Perspective:  my suggestion that marking should only be done at the rate and level at which students can respond to it.

Feedback the Michaela Way:  Jo Facer’s description of this radical and rather brilliant approach.

This term, with a new Head of Department at the helm in Maths, we’ve introduced what I think is an excellent model for marking and feedback.  Essentially, instead of writing comments – or in fact writing anything – we assess students in class and then give them questions to do that help them practise in the areas…

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