Grades are an important method of feedback. A student’s grade reveals how their efforts ranked according to a fixed classroom scale and how well they are meeting university standards. However, grades are poor means by which to express a student’s actual comprehension of course content or show them how they might improve.  Therefore, no matter how much a student may agonize over their grades, they are a relatively inconsequential component to their mastery of course material. Grades should be but but one form of feedback we provide.

The principal goal of effective feedback is to improve learning outcomes. Our feedback should direct students towards specific and achievable goals, enhance student-faculty communication, and reduce student anxiety and uncertainty about course objectives.  This brief module will offer a brief overview of how to construct more impactful feedback, tools and specific ideas to improve the feedback you provide, and a short list of campus resources for further exploration.

Suggestions for Improved Feedback

Rethink feedback

Feedback, like the assignments we give students, should be learning opportunities in their own right. Effective feedback does not simply show students what they got wrong or legitimize the grade we gave them but provides students an opportunity to gain new knowledge even after the assignment has been submitted, graded, and returned.

Make feedback actionable

The feedback we provide our students must be specific, concrete, and direct. It should provide students with corrective guidance that is easily digestible, guides students towards desired goals, and provides a pathway by which students can critically analyze their own work (meta-cognition).

Be succinct but specific

Your feedback should contain neither praise nor criticism that is not tied to a student’s performance to a specific learning objective.^[1] For example, avoid writing “great job!” on a student’s paper. Once you start with this type of vague praise, students will read it and then proceed to ignore everything else besides their letter grade. You must be specific to help students understand what they did well (or what they did poorly). What did the student do a “great job” at? Try instead: “you did a great job in your introduction concisely articulating your major arguments and highlighting your main evidence.”

Personalize feedback

Thoughtful, tailored feedback that uses a student’s name and comments directly to the merits of their paper is essential for student success. In addition to showing students how they can best improve, it communicates to them that they are not simply numbers, cogs in the wheel of industrialized education. By demonstrating an interest in our students’ success, we facilitate a closer student-faculty relationship, decrease students’ feelings of isolation, improve student motivation, and increase their investment in our courses.

Offer feedback early in the creation stage of large assignments, provide multiple opportunities for students to receive it

Feedback should help student improve and so is most effective prior to the final draft of an assignment.  Consider giving students feedback on rough drafts, or have students review each others’ projects.

Specific tools to improve the feedback you give.

Learning management systems, such as Desire 2 Learn, offer a number of ways to provide students with quick and effective feedback on their writing assignments. Below are a select number of feedback tools available on (or can be integrated with) D2L. However, if you find that these, or any other forms of educational technology are not helping you as an instructor, use whatever method works best for you and your students. Using technology that is unsuited to your teaching style, or unnecessarily encumbers your pedagogy with extra steps, is wasteful and impedes your effectiveness as an instructor.

Dropbox Document Viewer

For how to use Dropbox see the module Collect Assignments with Dropbox.

UW Google Apps

To learn how to give feedback using Google Apps, check out the Google Apps FAQ KB.doc^[2]

Using a Word Processor

For more on feedback using word processor see the final section at the bottom of the module Collect Assignments with Dropbox.

Additional Resources

The Writing Center

One-on-one consultations, workshops, programs, events, The Sourcebook (excellent teaching resource), Writing Across the Curriculum.

• Writing Across the Curriculum
• The Writing Center
• See specially: Overview of  Responding, Evaluating, and Grading

Learning Support Services

One-on-one consultations and web resources to assist with feedback.
Website: lss.wisc.edu

Teaching Academy

Workshops, events, online instructional material.
Website: https://teachingacademy.wisc.edu/

MediaSpace

• KB doc – Kaltura
• https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/