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5.4. Providing Good Feedback

Feedback Tips

Providing students with meaningful feedback helps them to not only understand the content better but to understand their own thinking and learning processes as well. Meaningful feedback greatly enhances learning and improves student achievement. Here are some tips for providing meaningful feedback to students (@Rebezuniga, 2014):

• Be as specific as possible. Phrases such as "good job" don't tell the learner what they did right and "not quite there yet" doesn't give insight into what needs to be done better. Take the time to provide your learners with information on exactly what they did well, and what may still need improvement. 
• Give feedback sooner rather than later. Feedback is most effective when it is given immediately rather than a few days, weeks, or months down the line. The University of Minnesota found that students were able to comprehend material better with immediate versus delayed feedback. 
• Address the learner's advancement toward a goal. Effective feedback is most often oriented around a specific achievement that students are or should be, working toward. 
• Present feedback carefully. Situations in which feedback could be counterproductive include when the learner feels too strictly monitored, when learners interpret feedback as an attempt to control them, and when learners feel an uncomfortable sense of competition. Explain the purpose of any monitoring. Feedback is meant to help them to compete against their own personal bests.
• Involve learners in the process. Students must be given access to information about their performance.

• Start with a positive message. A positive message provides encouragement. Start with something positive before discussing areas that need to be improved.
• Say something personal. Include examples from students' work so they know you have read it and that the feedback is personal to their work.
• Help students to see the connection between the course and their lives. In your feedback, you can apply real-world examples to their work or as examples for them to follow.
• Consider presenting feedback in different formats. You may choose to give feedback in writing, but you might also record a short audio or video response using the tools in D2L.
• If your course has rubrics, use them for assessment and feedback. Rubrics help students to see where they earned or lost points against a set of outcomes or criteria and levels of performance.