Best practices for academic feedback

While the content and focus of feedback offered to students will depend on each individual course and assignment, several principles transcend disciplinary boundaries. When setting up feedback mechanisms for your course, try to ensure that the comments students receive are:

• Timely: even the most helpful feedback will not lead to improved learning if it is received too late for the student to put to use. Students experience multiple and ever-shifting demands on their attention, so offering just-in-time feedback that can be applied immediately in the next practice cycle is key to leveraging feedback for learning.
• Focused: as disciplinary experts assessing student work, we can easily name multiple areas in need of improvement. But an overabundance of feedback, or feedback that is overly detailed and unfocused, can be overwhelming and unhelpful to a novice learner. (Imagine a beginning swimmer trying to simultaneously process multiple instructions regarding their breathwork, legs, arms, abdomen, and acceleration while also trying to stay afloat.) It is important to reign in our impulse to name every shortcoming and to focus on priority items aligned with the goals of each assignment/practice opportunity.
• Transparent: as instructors, we might know exactly why we have designed a particular practice opportunity or assessment, but our goals might not be at all apparent to our students. Transparent communication of assessment goals is essential in helping students understand the value of what we are asking them to do–and in encouraging learners to attend to the feedback they receive afterwards. One way of communicating assessment priorities is by means of an analytic rubric: a grid listing specific assessment criteria for an assignment.
• Actionable: after receiving feedback, students should be able to understand how they can apply it to subsequent work. Designing iterative practice opportunities, and asking students to keep track of how they apply feedback, helps foster accountability and develop capacity for self-sponsored learning.
• Friendly: it is easy for experts to underestimate how stressful receiving feedback can be for a novice. Research shows that students consistently perceive the tone of instructor comments as more hostile than intended. Keeping the tone of our feedback friendly and positive can go a long way towards motivating students to revise their work–even when the feedback includes critiques and corrections. For example, the comment, “Introduction lacks focus!” might accurately describe a messy essay opening, but conveys neither care nor a path towards improvement. A more helpful comment might read, “There are several interesting ideas here but it wasn’t clear to me which one you wanted the reader to focus on. Can you identify one focal point and trim the others?” Small tweaks like this can go a long way towards communicating care, articulating the importance of revision, and encouraging authentic engagement with instructor feedback.

Feedback Loops

Offering thoughtful, personalized feedback on student work requires time and effort. How frustrating, then, to see that effort wasted when students glance at their grade and discard their tests or papers without reading the feedback–or when they do read the feedback but repeat the exact same errors on the next assessment. In the case of the significant percentage of feedback given via digital platforms, instructors might not even know whether their thoughtfully-crafted responses have been read at all. To mitigate this all-too-common problem, and to make feedback do the educational work it is supposed to do, instructors might consider setting up protocols that require students to engage with–and act upon–the feedback they receive. Here are a few examples:

• Revise and resubmit options: the opportunity to improve and resubmit work based on feedback creates a natural incentive to engage with instructor comments (not to mention emulating “real life” academic and professional processes). Multi-stage or scaffolded assignments, where revision and resubmission are a required part of the assignment process, are one way to ensure that all students (not just a highly motivated minority) engage in feedback-driven revision. For example, instructors might require an initial draft and a revised draft for all assigned papers, ask for resubmissions of completed problem sets with alternate solutions, or mandate revisions to a design portfolio based on real or simulated client feedback.
• Portfolios: assignment portfolios provide a more robust, systematized version of the “revise and resubmit” approach, where students are required to gather evidence of learning progress over time. A typical portfolio might include a series of original practice attempts together with revisions of select items, often accompanied by a reflection narrative in which the student details their revision process and overall progress towards assignment learning goals.
• Response/reflection logs: to revise their work based on instructor feedback, students need to read the feedback in the first place. One way of ensuring that students access and consider our feedback is to require a response/reflection based on the comments received. Ideally, rather than one-time responses, these reflections would build on one another throughout the term, adding up to a record of the student’s academic progress.

While setting up feedback loops allows students to engage meaningfully with instructor comments, a single loop (or even a series of single loops) might not provide the depth required for lasting learning. Ideally, students would engage in a long-term, iterative process of practice and revision during which they not only improve their academic outcomes but also, at the metacognitive level, adjust their learning habits and approaches. A better metaphor for this process might perhaps be not so much a feedback loop as a feedback spiral–a series of progressive, interlocking loops through which students deepen and expand their knowledge and skills as they progress towards meeting their learning goals.

Beyond one-on-one instructor feedback

One of the main barriers preventing instructors from offering personalized and timely feedback on student learning is workload. In classes of fifty (or five hundred) students, offering each individual learner targeted comments might seem like an impossible feat. The good news is that not all feedback has to be directed to individual learners, and that instructors do not have to be the sole providers of meaningful feedback in a course. Whole-class-feedback, peer-feedback, self-assessment, and technology-supported feedback offer alternative channels for students to receive helpful comments on their work. Whatever the format, it is important to invest in a positive culture of feedback, so that students understand the value of feedback as an integral part of the learning process, and learn to receive, give, attend to, and apply it successfully.

• Whole-class feedback: real-time in-class assessment opportunities like flash quizzes or surveys can naturally be followed by whole-class discussion (and clarification) of common error patterns. Similarly, an exam wrapper session after a high-stakes assessment might involve addressing common misconceptions and gaps at the class level. (Post-exam games like “common error bingo” can help students see that they were not alone in going astray and that mistakes are a normal part of the learning process.) Offering a two-stage exam opportunities, where students work together to arrive at the correct answers based on their prior individual attempts, can also help in correcting errors and misconceptions without instructor intervention.
• Peer feedback: like many academic skills, the ability to give useful feedback does not come automatically. It needs to be taught. The investment is well worth it, however, as students benefit from the ability to analyze one another’s work and to envision necessary steps towards achieving better outcomes. Working with templates and rubrics that clearly articulate assignment criteria allows students to develop the analytical skills needed for assessing the work of others–and their own.
• Self-assessment: much like peer-review, self-assessment is an acquired skill. Requiring self-assessment and/or reflection following assignments and tests builds students’ metacognitive capacity for monitoring their own progress, identifying gaps and patterns, and adjusting their work accordingly. Simply building in time for self-assessment and self-reflection in the middle of an academic project can go a long way towards improving the quality of the final product, especially when the student self-assessment is guided by curated questions provided by the instructor.

In the case of in-class and out-of-class learning experiences where students stand to benefit from real-time feedback on their work, educational technology (like LMS quizzes or video-quiz software) can help provide pre-programed responses and hints to guide student practice. The rise of generative artificial intelligence has also enabled the development of custom pre-trained chatbots that can serve as “tutors” providing individualized feedback to learners.

Feedback for the instructor

Any discussion of feedback in the academic classroom needs to include the importance of soliciting, processing, and incorporating feedback on our own teaching practice. While end-of-term student evaluations provide a formal mechanism for soliciting student feedback, the data gathered in this way, much like end-of-term student grades, comes too late to make improvements to the course in question. A better mechanism for collecting real-time feedback is the anonymous check-in, where students can communicate their experience of the course and make requests for tweaks and adjustments. Even if the instructor does not act upon every recommendation (which are more likely than not to be contradictory), simply acknowledging student input can go a long way towards building trust and rapport with the class. The additional benefit of a middle-of-the-term check-in is that the students can also reflect on how they might adjust their own behavior to get more out of the class.

In addition to soliciting student feedback, instructors, just like students, can benefit from peer feedback as well as self-assessment and self-reflection. Peer review of teaching can include class observations, but also feedback on syllabi, assignments, online materials, and any other element of the course. Formative peer feedback, especially when solicited voluntarily, can become one of the most meaningful–and surprisingly fun–tools in the professional development of academic instructors. Finally, as Stephen Brookfield argues in Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, critical self-reflection can help us better align our teaching practice with our values, and become stronger, more intentional, and happier educators.

Check out these related teaching tips on engagement check-ins and equity audits for your classroom, as well as on making the most of student evaluations of teaching. [Requires sharepoint login]

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