1. Motivational feedback

Motivational feedback is necessary for students to learn and make progress. Therefore, we need to be careful when providing feedback information mainly in situations where students feel frustrated as they fail to achieve their goals.

So, teacher feedback needs to promote a positive self-concept and self-confidence in the student regardless of his/her work or learning needs.

But how can you make your feedback motivating?

• Encourage your students

Encouragement is “the positive persuasive expression of the belief that someone has the capability of achieving a certain goal”(Dörnyei, 2013, p.91).

Research evidence suggests that encouraging expressions are capable of eliciting a long-term emotional reaction and so enhancing cognitive processes and improving performance. This would be true even if the subject is aware of the possible lack of connection between emotional expressions and their real performance.

Indeed, encouragement can make students aware of their strengths and weaknesses and communicate teachers’ trust and belief in their capability.

Some students need your encouragement more than others, as they find it tough to move forward and reach the next goal.

So, a soft smile, a kind word, a light touch on the hand and regular communication with the student about his/her learning issues and concerns can have a powerful effect on his/her learning.

• Offer praise

Praise and positive verbal evaluation of students’ performance or work are most often used to reinforce behaviours.

Researchers from Brigham Young University, the University of Kansas and Vanderbilt University have found that if teachers focus on praising their students for appropriate classroom behaviour, rather than reprimanding them for being disruptive, it will improve their behaviour in class.

Offering praise can also increase student satisfaction and lift the learning spirit. Yet, we need to understand how to calibrate praise to induce such a motivational effect among our students.

Here are some tips:

#Praise effort and accomplishment, not ability

Praise should focus on students’ efforts and accomplishments so that they can relate their efforts with improved academic or behavioural performance.

So, instead of saying “You’re good at writing”, praise your student saying “You worked hard to improve your writing. This is clear in your essay. Great work!”

Focusing on effort and accomplishment, you’re encouraging all your students to work hard. This is so since you’re not comparing their performance against each other and lowering their self-efficacy.

#Make your praise more descriptive

When communicating with the student, highlight what is good about his/her work, discuss the success criteria, listen to and answer their questions and prompt them to reflect on their process (accomplishing the task).

Your praise will not just help students understand your expectations but also make them feel self-fulfilled because they know why you validate their effort. This can motivate them to learn more.

#Avoid overpraising

Frequent praise can undermine students’ confidence and initiative. So, be sincere and offer praise only when students deserve: mastery of a new skill, doing a challenging task, making good progress in a project, etc.

2. Positive feedback

Positive information feedback contributes to students’ learning, rather than dampening it down. That is, it reinforces positive action, prompting the student to reflect on their learning and understand their strengths and weaknesses.

To provide your students with positive feedback information, here are some suggestions:

• Communicate explicitly to students the goals, criteria and expected standards of a given task. So, your feedback needs to support students to understand the success criteria and behaviours to achieve them.
• Make your feedback timely, clear, focused upon the attainable and expressed in a way that will encourage a person to think and, if he or she thinks that is necessary to change. You can send your feedback via email so that students can read it again as well as file it.
• Your feedback must be understood and internalized by the student before it can be used productively. So, provide opportunities for students (in groups/individually) to discuss their work, progress and learning needs.
• It needs to be descriptive rather than evaluative, which means showing the gap between the student’s actual performance and the goals, criteria and standards which define the academic competence.
• It should also provide information on how successfully the students were applying various strategies and how their strategy use was improving their performance.
• In your feedback, focus on the process of learning, including efforts and strategic behaviours instead of being concerned with the person’s ability or intelligence.
• Give students time to absorb and act upon or consolidate the feedback comments.
• Provide also feedback on work on progress, involving students in planning strategies for improvement.
• Give students the chance to revise their work, re-do it and resubmit it. You can support them with a checklist that relates to the task at hand so that they can revise their work before their submission. Students can also discuss their work in groups before submitting them and providing oral feedback.
• Provide regular feedback on how your students are progressing and the areas they need to improve further.

 

3. FeedForward

For effective learning, teacher feedback also needs to include feedforward.

What does this mean?

Feedforward points to opportunities and provides pathways for improvement and growth.

When including feedforward you’re not just focusing on the present work, but also stressing how the student can improve in the next assignment. So, feedforward is ‘future-oriented’ (Sadler, 2010).

Integrating feedforward within your feedback provision process is likely to improve your students’ learning outcomes.

To learn more about how to integrate feedforward more effectively within both formative and summative assessment read: From Feeding back to Feeding forward

 

Motivating, positive and feeding forward are the main qualities of effective teacher feedback.

Remember always that your feedback has a powerful impact on your students’ learning and achievement. It can either be a detriment or a positive stimulus to their learning.

So, improving teacher feedback is worthwhile. Keep reflecting on your feedback and learn about how your students find it using reflective worksheets that assess both the quality of your feedback and the process you’re communicating it.

References

Dörnyei, Z.(2013). Motivational Strategies in The Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sadler, D.R.(2010). Beyond Feedback: Developing Student Capability in Complex Appraisal. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 35,(5), 535-550.