Errors and feedback > Emulating teacher feedback
Question 9
What are the relative benefits of e-assessment giving feedback on a student’s set of responses (e.g. “two of these answers are wrong – find which ones and correct them”), rather than individual responses separately?
Tim Lowe
Niclas Larson
George Kinnear
Colin FosterThis question can be interpreted on two levels, based on the scale of the “set of responses”.
First, the set of responses may be to a single multiple-response item (e.g. “which of the following functions are differentiable?” or “give three different examples of parabolas with no real roots”). In this case, the feedback is about this single item, and the question asks about the relative benefits of giving students precise details of which options where right or wrong, compared to simply telling students the number of the options they selected which were right or wrong.
Second, the set of responses may be to a whole quiz consisting of several different items. In this case, the question is about the relative merits of giving quiz-level feedback (e.g. “3 of these are wrong; find which ones they are and fix them”) versus giving item-level feedback.
What motivates this question?
One the one hand, this approach to giving feedback goes against recommendations that formative feedback should be specific (e.g. Shute, 2008). On the other hand, it is inspired by the idea that “students, the recipients of feedback, do as much work as the teacher who provides the feedback” (Wiliam, 2016) and is generally aligned with the intention to “do for the students what they cannot yet do for themselves” (Mason, 2000), i.e. adopting an approach of scaffolding and fading.
What might an answer look like?
Experiments could compare the two approaches (block-level feedback vs item-level feedback) in terms of their impact on students’ learning. This could include investigating different approaches to the block-level feedback, which could be made specific to the topic in hand, e.g.
- “You’ve made one sign error on this page”
- “One of these functions you integrated, instead of differentiated”
- “You failed to use the chain rule twice”
- “You mischaracterised one of the stationary points”
A qualitative approach could be used to investigate student (and teacher) opinions about the two approaches, as the “relative benefits” may extend beyond narrow measures of learning.
Related questions
- Block-level feedback is an example of an approach to feeding back on students’ errors Q3: What are the approaches to detecting and feeding back on students’ errors?
- The block-level feedback could be given in stages using a decision tree, as in Q8: How useful for students’ long-term learning is feedback that gives a series of follow-up questions, from a decision tree, versus a single terminal piece of feedback?
- The student response to block-level feedback could be of interest in Q17: What are students’ views on e-assessment, and what are their expectations from automated feedback?
References
Mason, J. (2000). Asking mathematical questions mathematically. International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology, 31(1), 97–111. https://doi.org/10.1080/002073900287426
Shute, V. J. (2008). Focus on Formative Feedback. Review of Educational Research, 78(1), 153–189. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654307313795
Wiliam, D. (2016). The Secret of Effective Feedback. Educational Leadership, 73(7), 10–15. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/apr16/vol73/num07/The-Secret-of-Effective-Feedback.aspx