ASSESSMENT

From Feeding Back to Feeding Forward

Last Updated 11 January 2024/ By Zineb DJOUB

From feeding back to feeding forward, what does it mean, and what strategies to use to achieve it?

Teacher feedback is an important component of the assessment process upon which students’ learning can be enhanced. It reflects how much learning has been achieved thus indicating the effectiveness of the teaching process. With the increasing need to promote an assessment for learning culture in Education, feedback’s goals and processes need to go beyond grading practices to support the development of student autonomy.

Students need to process their teacher’s feedback to understand their mistakes, reflect on their learning needs, and take action to improve. Whether it is reflecting negative or positive comments, feedback need not be viewed as an end in itself referring to passing or failing. Rather, it should be considered a source of learning and making progress.

So, as teachers, we need to move from feeding back to feeding forward.

But, what does feedforward mean?

When your students work out your feedback to close the gap between the current level of performance and the expected learning objective they are involved in a process called feedforward. Also, feedforward covers your actions to support your students to learn and progress with your suggestions and guidelines which go beyond your feedback.

Here are some strategies that you can use within both summative and formative assessment to encourage your students to interpret your feedback and act to close the learning gap, thereby feeding forward.

Summative assessment

To stimulate students’ interest in working out your feedback on exams, there is a need to clarify what this process entails. The latter includes 3 stages:

1) Analyzing feedback: This involves interpreting the mark/grade and its corresponding comment. To help your students achieve this stage, you can provide them with questions that help prompt such an interpretation. These can, for instance, include:

• What are the keywords in the feedback comments?
• How do these comments relate to your performance?
• What mistakes or deficiencies these comments are addressing?
• How does the grade/mark relate to the grading scale?
• What kind of knowledge/skills are reflected in the feedback comments?
• What piece of advice does this feedback advocate?

 

To support students in answering those questions, you can use the following worksheet which you can hand out to students immediately after obtaining their marks and attending the exam correction in class. (Click on the image to download this worksheet)

But, before engaging them in such a task, you should clarify the assessment criteria and the required performance of that exam.

2) Planning: After analyzing your feedback, students need to plan to close the learning gap. To this end, you can ask them to:

• Indicate their needs to improve their performance;
• State what mark and comments they want to get;
• Tell their teacher about the kind of support they need to improve;
• Plan for their actions by setting a schedule and a deadline to achieve their learning goals.

3) Evaluating: After taking action to close the learning gaps, students evaluate their learning progress by assessing the achievement of their plans. They can compare their last received feedback with the previous using the following chart.

Comparing teacher’s summative feedback

In comparing their teacher’s feedback of semester one and semester two, for instance, students indicate if there is any improvement in the second exam by crossing either yes or no.

Those who have improved are asked to indicate how much improvement they have made by calculating the difference between the two marks: (mark2− mark1) x 100÷20. For example, if the student obtains in the first exam 10/20 while in the second exam of the same course, s/he got 14/20, the rate of improvement is 20%.

However, students need to recognize the difference between their performance of the first exam and that of the second exam. They can, therefore, indicate that difference by pointing out the type of mistakes and errors they made in the first exam. Then, they can state the reason why they have improved, i.e., what plans and actions were more effective.

In case there is no improvement or rather drawbacks, students can describe their performance referring to their weaknesses and stating why they have not achieved their learning goals.

Formative assessment

In formative assessment, more opportunities are to be provided for students to work out their teacher’s feedback. This means you need to do it regularly to help students gain insight into their learning strengths and weaknesses in your course. So, how to move from feeding back to feeding forward within self-assessment and peer-assessment approaches?

Self-assessment

You can make self-assessment a powerful tool for students to feed forward. Involving students, for instance, in writing portfolios allows them to reflect on their performance and the provided feedback, thereby relating them to the task goals and criteria and setting plans to improve their performance.

You can provide your students with the above questions to interpret formative assessment feedback. Give them time in class to compare their performance with the required performance.

You can schedule conferences for this purpose where you listen to each student’s interpretation and provide your responses, i.e., explanations, etc. Holding such dialogue enables your students to clarify and justify more their feedback, thereby identifying the learning gap.

Because your formative feedback may consist only of your comments, you can ask your students to describe their feelings and opinions towards such comments, to indicate the grade or mark that corresponds to that feedback, and the learning needs and plans to achieve them.

To do so, reflective worksheets can be provided for students to complete after class. Students can keep these worksheets as part of their portfolios, journals, or set separately. An example is provided here.

Acting upon feedback comments implies being involved in actions to act on or remedy failures. After interpreting and reflecting on these comments, encourage your students to initiate and take an active role to improve their performance.

For example, a student receiving a feedback comment indicating a deficiency in the use of punctuation and capitalization, s/he needs to practice more exercises on this topic and attach them to those reflective worksheets so that you can relate her/his plans to that practice (there must be a connection between the two). To encourage them to submit their reflection along with their initiative for correction, you can reward students for their efforts.

But, should you give grades in addition to your comments in formative assessment?

Providing grades or marks is not just limited to summative assessment forms, teachers’ need to provide them with formative assessment is also common to measure students’ progress over time.

Yet, grades may distract students from learning from feedback. So, since the objective of formative feedback is to contribute to students’ learning, it is worth returning students’ work with feedback comments without grades. If you have to grade, you can write down the marks in your records and give them to your students after submitting their feedback reflection, and initiative.

Peer-assessment

Peer feedback can also help students involved in feedforward. So, what peer assessment opportunities can you provide to support your students to learn from peer feedback?

You can use peer assessment of class presentations which is likely to stimulate students’ interest and feelings of self-confidence. Students can record their views, comments, and suggestions regarding the quality of their peers’ presentations and discuss them later in groups.

Ask students to indicate what kind of feedback they found more constructive and how they need to use it to improve future class presentations.

Still, to structure their feedback and focus more on their observation there is a need to familiarize students with the criteria or rubrics set for such presentations. So, have them as a guide which they can refer to as they work on those presentations or use assignment return sheets.

You can also use class blogs for peer feedback. Students can post their feedback comments regarding their classmates’ performance of projects’ presentations in class. In turn, their classmates respond to their feedback by addressing questions to their teacher about it.

For instance, in case a student/ group of students got a feedback comment indicating that they had a problem in managing time and making their ideas coherent, their question can cover how to write a project outline for presentation and use efficiently the allotted time for performing.

However, students need teachers’ guidance regarding the kind of feedback comments to be provided. Those comments need to be explicit (clear: using simple language), and relevant (constructive: supporting students to improve), students should be objective, i.e., honest and respectful in expressing them.

Guide them with a set of questions such as:

• How did you find the project/its presentation?
• What have you learned from them?
• What remarks, advice, or recommendations would you put forward for your classmates?

Two important notes

1) Whatever kind of formative approach you opt for, it is important to train students to process its feedback. To train them in the process :

• Raise your students’ awareness of the importance of processing feedback to learn more about their strengths and weaknesses in your course.

• Provide them with examples of feedback comments that relate to the course and ask them to interpret and reflect on them, besides guessing how it needs to be worked out more effectively.

• Give them examples of feedback’s interpretations, reflections, decisions, and plans intended to learn from them, then ask them to guess the kind of feedback comments relative to them. You can do this in class (e.g., as a warm-up task) or assign it in groups as homework.

• Another alternative would be designing lessons that involve students in using feedback on previous work to produce better work. This is by using, for instance, a series of homework, quizzes, and projects which provide them with feedback on how to work and prepare for the next assignment.

• Clarify to them the benefit and purpose of reviewing another student’s work and providing her/him with feedback (peer assessment).

• Give students the ground rules for peer editing to guide their practices (see the example below). In pairs, students can peer-edit each other, and then engage in discussion to justify their feedback concerning those rules.

Ground rules for peer editing (source: Brookhart, 2008, p. 70)

2) You need to understand how your students feel about and respond to your feedback, in addition to what they want as feedback to avoid using counter-productive strategies.

Some seek to improve their work and get better grades. Others react indifferently to detailed comments concerning their work, whereas there are students who consider feedback comments as crucial. This can help you support them to participate actively in the feedforward process.

These were my suggested strategies to move from feeding back to feeding forward in your assessment. You can make your feedback a powerful tool for your students’ learning and progress. So support them to feedforward.

References

Brookhart, S. M. (2008). How to give effective feedback to your students. USA: ASCD publications.