Center for Teaching & Learning: Perspectives on Teaching & Learning

Are You Giving Effective Feedback or Advice?

Grant Wiggins’ article, Seven Keys to Effective Feedback, begins with an excellent comment and question—one every instructor should ask themselves. The

“Advice, evaluation, grades—none of these provide the descriptive information that students need to reach their goals. What is true feedback—and how can it improve learning?”

Improving learning is the purpose of formative assessment. If done right, we are informing our students of how their observable actions affected their goal-attainment efforts.  Useful feedback should be goal-referenced, tangible and transparent, actionable, user-friendly, timely, ongoing, and consistent  “Goal-orient"  is an especially important point. This is a primary concern and likely the reason that Wiggins begins his list with this topic.  The following is his list of seven key characteristics to effective feedback:

1. Goal-referenced - This is a simple concept, but sometimes it is overlooked (e.g. assignment questions that are too open-ended and leave the students to hunt and peck). Without a clear target, the students can’t plot their course. They don’t know what to do, and the chances of successful learning through specific, goal-related feedback diminish.
2. Tangible &Transparent – The language we use provide feedback may be clear to us, but when students don’t act on that feedback, it is important to consider this feedback key. Did the student understand your comment and understand it sufficiently within the context to learn from and apply it? (Wiggins illustrates this in his article with a few examples of feedback miscommunication.)
3. Actionable – The feedback should be concrete, specific, and useful in order to be “actionable”.  One approach is to provide observations without judgment. This can be easier to accept and possibly allow the student to step back and view their work from a new vantage point. The observations need to be highly descriptive for this to work.
4. User-friendly – This is simple. Use language and tone that support your intended communication with your students – meet them where they are to support them. As a writer or speaker, we adjust for our audience.
5. Timely – What does timely mean? The most obvious is that students receive feedback on discussion forum participation before they join a new discussion in the following week. Likewise, they receive feedback on their first paper before the second paper is due. While this may be obvious to some or the ideal we strive for, the significance is deeper than “being on time”. Each assignment is a learning step built upon the previous learning experiences. We are helping students grow and these are formative assessments – feedback is the backbone of a formative assessment.
6. Ongoing – It is nearly impossible to for a student to change their performance without feedback. The earlier and more frequent students receive feedback, the greater the opportunity for adjustments and learning. Think of ongoing feedback as multiple data points.
7. Consistent – “Stable, accurate, and trustworthy” are the three descriptors of consistent feedback. This is a common argument for using rubrics. It is easy to drift when evaluating student work. When grading a pile of papers, our expectations may shift as we read the submissions. Developing and adhering to a clear standard of high-quality work is needed. Helpful tools include rubrics and exemplars for your students and you.

This is a lot to consider and time is precious. However, Wiggins admonishes us to remember the following:

‘"(N)o time to give and use feedback’ actually means “no time to cause learning.”  

Wiggins, G. (2012). Seven key to effective feedback. Educational Leadership, 70(1), 10-16. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept12/vol70/num01/Seven-Keys-to-Effective-Feedback.aspx.