How to Give Your Students Better Feedback With Technology
How to Give Your Students Better Feedback With Technology
How to Give Your Students Better Feedback With Technology
By Holly Fiock and Heather Garcia
November 28, 2019
Summary
Feedback can be a powerful force in college classrooms, and there are ways to make the experience of providing and receiving it even stronger.
Technology has the potential to make course feedback better — more effective, more engaging, more timely — but that won’t happen automatically.
A frequent misperception is that the only people who should worry about how instructors provide feedback are the instructors.
Jump to a section Essentials 4 Key Qualities of Good Feedback 2 Time-Saving Approaches When to Use Audio or Video Tools for Feedback When to Stick to Text Feedback Tips on Getting Started Common Pitfalls and Smart Solutions Resources Essentials We’ve all been the recipient of feedback that was more painful than productive.
When it comes to feedback, students and instructors often are not on the same page: Students want feedback with specific, detailed directions for future improvement, offered in a manner that is both constructive and encouraging.
Meanwhile, instructors, according to one study, “tended to believe their feedback was more useful, fair, understandable, constructive and encouraging and detailed in comparison to what students felt they were receiving.” So let’s start this guide by looking at the big picture. By providing individualized feedback, you help students stay on track, personalize their learning, and build trust and connections.
As technology continues to advance, so does the opportunity to provide feedback via different tools.
Audio: a sound file of your voice giving feedback on students’ work.
Video: a recorded file of you offering feedback either as a “talking head,” a screencast, or a mix of both.
Looking for a way to provide fast feedback? (We’ll discuss this more below in the “When to Use Audio or Video Tools for Feedback” section.) To put our cards on the table upfront: We are strong advocates of video and audio feedback, and that’s what you will see most emphasized in this guide.
Over all, when instructors use audio or video technologies, they tend to provide more feedback than written text alone. Yet, we’ve found that — once you learn the ropes — using audio or video feedback can save time.
Our goal here is to present different ways of giving feedback.
4 Key Qualities of Good Feedback But first, a caveat: Feedback is not the same as criticism.
The goal of any evaluation and feedback should be to support the learning process, help students understand where they did not meet established standards, and aid them in identifying what they can do better next time.
Two main types of feedback — formative and summative — work together in that process but have different purposes.
Throughout the course, students should receive ample formative and summative feedback, but let’s consider some general principles.
Students rely on your feedback to guide their learning. Some call that approach the “feedback sandwich” — corrective feedback sandwiched between positive feedback.
Formative feedback that meets all four principles is not just good practice but critical to student success.
But first we turn to two time-saving techniques — rubrics and peer review — that are essential to providing specific and balanced feedback.
When to Use Audio or Video Tools for Feedback Finding the right time and place to use technology on this front is easier than you might think.
Keep in mind: It’s not just about doing this part of your job more quickly or efficiently — it’s about making your feedback more effective for students.
Let’s consider a few scenarios in which audio and video feedback might be the best solution to a pedagogical challenge. A screencast video of a student’s assignment, coupled with you walking the student through the project using audio feedback, allows you to provide detailed, one-on-one support and build a closer connection with every student.
Or maybe, in evaluating a student’s paper, you usually make handwritten notes and then refer back to them in deciding on the final grade and feedback.
It’s difficult to evaluate verbal-presentation skills using written feedback alone. If you find that students seem to misinterpret your written communication, or if you receive student evaluation data that show you are perceived as cold and impersonal, audio or video feedback may help to resolve those problems. Here, again, audio and video feedback can come to the rescue, allowing you to personalize your feedback on a broad array of projects. Especially in an online classroom, audio or video feedback may help students feel less isolated. When you use audio or video feedback, especially in online environments, students begin to see you as a real person giving feedback — not just someone behind a computer screen.
In face-to-face teaching, digital tools can help you provide feedback more efficiently. In large classes, in addition to utilizing TAs, peer review and audio and video feedback can help learners feel connected to you and to one another.
Your learners may be more open to watching and listening to what you have to say, more so than reading it — so long as you don’t send long recordings (we recommend you limit audio and video feedback to three to five minutes). By using video and audio feedback tools, you are helping students solve their study-related problems in much the same way that they (or you) would have hopped on YouTube to find out how to change a tire.
When to Stick to Text Feedback Clearly we believe in the merits of audio and video feedback.
Some course-management systems have built-in annotation tools that you can use to leave comments and feedback directly on a student submission. Experience using these tools, ultimately, will help you save time when providing feedback to your students and improve the quality of that feedback.
Video and audio feedback doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, hearing your actual voice and tone is one element of audio and video feedback that appeals to students.
Resources What follows is a list of applications and technologies that we’ve found most useful in providing feedback.
Reference
Fiock, H., & Garcia, H. (2019, November 11). How to Give Your Students Better Feedback With Technology. Retrieved February 4, 2020, from https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191108-Advice-Feedback