Generating feedback for self and for others
To what extent do students on your course have explicit opportunities to generate feedback for themselves and for their peers?
Why?
- Students are generating feedback all the time as they regulate their own learning, so it makes sense to build on this capability for them to become better at self-regulation
- Teachers only provide advice or information – to become feedback the student must internalise this information and compare it with the work they have produced - hence all feedback is actually internally generated and is a consequence such comparison processes
- Students can generate very productive feedback by making other comparisons, for example of their work with (i) the task requirements, with criteria, (ii) exemplars, (iii) the work of peers, (iv) explanations or models in a textbook or (v) a discussion about the quality of such works or about its production. To maximise learning students must actively compare and provide a response (e.g. a written report).
- Having students generate their own feedback through multiple comparisons can increase learning without any increase in teacher workload!
- Generating feedback for peers is especially valuable as it not only develops the student’s ability to make judgements about others’ work, but it also results in the student making reflective comparisons with their own work
- Producing feedback for others is a graduate skill required in professional practice but not usually deliberately taught in higher education
How to begin
- One-minute paper adapted. Have students at the end of a lecture write a short explanation of a complex topic, perhaps going beyond exactly what was discussed. Then look at these briefly and if many are not so good at the beginning of the next lecture ask students to get in groups and do the same task again. In doing this they will compare what they did before with the discussion and with the group output and generate a lot of internal feedback from that. They will give and receive feedback to and from each other.
- Ask students to compare their own work against the criteria or against exemplars before they hand in their work and write a feedback report about its strengths and weaknesses
- Sequence evaluations of work so that students carry out reviews of another's work and then write a self-review of their own work