3rd Seminar - Feedback

 

One of the topics, which are very vivid online. And very important for corporate, business, training and management worlds. And becomes ever more important in learning.

It raise came after very influential study from Israel, where in one experiment comment only feedback group performed best out of 3 groups – comment only, comment and grade and grade only group. This was only one study, one experiment done in Israel, therefore one must be very careful about its generalisation or transformation of the results in another cultural setting. But as our lectures said – worth paying attention to. And probably turning from ‘grades are important’ culture to ‘how you act to improve’ culture.

Than we tried to establish some basics features of effective feedback and ineffectual feedback and had practice session with example of students work, where we meant to give a feedback. This was probably the best and most important part of the seminar. For me at least, as it made me realise what thinking process I need to apply to provide effective feedback, how to word my comments and what activities will be the best for action. Definitely not an easy task…

Feedback in probably most important part of assessment for learning. The part, which can make greatest contribution toward successful implementation of AfL (when implementing AfL one need good quality feedback too;-).

In Learning setting it means that I know, where to concentrate my feedback, what to mark, as I cannot mark everything at once (assessment for different purposes) and it simply means that I know my learning objective and I success criteria (which is not the same). One of the good practice is to use questions to break success criteria down into plain English… Just then I can give feedback focused on my aims and with clear notions on how to improve. Thankfully we are moving from ‘praise them all’ to give them true picture.

Again, as with may things here, we can agree with theory, but how to turn it into effective practice?

If you have some really good practical suggestions, please share them in comments. Thanks.