Here’s a story I am sure most teachers relate to: You finished checking your students’ essays in which you provided feedback that you know will help them perform better next time. When you return the essays, you see how some students check their pages, scan for the score and when they find it, they put the essay in the middle of their notebooks, oblivious to the feedback you wrote. This is a story I have lived many times. At first, if I’m being honest, I would get a little mad. I mean, think about it, all the time invested writing feedback for nothing?
Although it made sense feeling a little upset, I felt there was something in the system I was implementing that was not working. I wanted my students to read my comments and learn from their mistakes. I wanted them to shift their attention from the score to the knowledge and improvement they were making. Achieving this was going to be a challenge, mainly because students are used to receiving a plain score, which generally overshadows the improvement and progress they should be aiming at.
Given this situation, I started pondering two main questions:
How could I make students pay more attention to feedback?
How could I enhance the feedback I gave my students?
Digging into feedback effectiveness, I found an article published on Edutopia about how important it is for students to have some time to interact with the feedback, as it allows them to fix their mistakes (Bowman, 2020) . This was such a breakthrough to me, as I realized that feedback should be used in the present rather than in the future or for the “next time”.
Providing time for students to use feedback is not enough. What is the point of making time for the feedback if it does not provide you with useful information? By reading Hattie (2012), I found out there are four levels of feedback (task, process, self-regulation, and self-level). Most of my feedback landed on the task level, meaning I mostly focused on what was incorrect or correct, providing some knowledge to understand why it was correct or not. Although this is not completely bad, adding comments about the process of the task could have been more beneficial. In addition to this, there are certain elements that are deemed vital and, yet, I didn’t always include. One of those is instructing what you are expecting them to do. Good feedback should also instruct next steps on the learning, what Hattie calls “Feed forward”. This made me think I should be more clear on what I want my students to do with the feedback they’ve received, the changes I expect to see and the reflections I expect them to make.
Up to that moment, I’d found ways for students to provide better feedback. My second concern was how to deviate their attention from the score without making them feel that scores didn’t matter (because, whether we like it or not, scores do matter in our school system). Doing some research, I found this was a concern shared by other teachers as well. One approach I found quite interesting was described by Fledman (2019) in his book “Grading for Equity”. He proposes a “standard-based” approach to assessment. Basically, the idea behind it is replacing scores for an indicator that could provide valuable information about the students’ performance without the need to compete or compare with others to see who gets a “higher score”. This was one idea I took and I detail below.
Having discovered so much theory, I decided to start actions that took as principles the ideas I’d read. So, here’s what I did:
1. Less grading: Something I found important was to reduce the amount of graded activities I was doing. What this meant in practice was that students would only receive the feedback from the activities without having to worry that the activities would impact their final grade. Immediately after receiving the feedback, students had to fix the mistakes identified based on the feedback received and then, they had to return it or show it. Although the quizzes didn’t have a score, I kept track of the students’ progress on a separate sheet. This allowed me to monitor their learning over a period of time.
2. Retakes: When the performance of a student was lower than average, in addition to correcting the mistakes from the quiz, they had to retake the quiz after revising the content one more time with the help of one of their peers or mine. The students only had three opportunities to retake the test. If the low performance persisted, it signaled something else was interfering with their learning, so they would be directed to the academic coordinator. This was not done as a punishment; insted, it aimed to explore deeper into the causes hindering their progress.
3. Standard-based grading: In order to shift the focus of attention from scores to performance, I graded students based on whether they had achieved certain levels of competency. For this, I divided the scores into three main strands. If a student had obtained a 9-10, it was translated into a “mastered” level of competency, which demonstrated they were ready to move on to the next topic. If the score was between 7-8, it translated into an “approaching” level of competency, which meant they were close to mastering the content and therefore, they needed to practice a little more. Finally, if the score ranged between 0-6, it translated into “Need support” level of competency. This required students to take catch-up lessons, during which they would revisit their answers and discuss their thinking process.
After implementing this system over a period of three months, I observed three main changes:
Students’ language about assessment had changed. Suddenly, students were not talking about numbers anymore. Instead, they discussed what level of mastery they had achieved and what this meant for them. I could also notice that this modified students’ way of seeing assessment. Assessment had become something dynamic rather than fixed (See Brown, 2014 ). I attribute this to the fact that students knew they could revise the content and move to another level of competency.
As students started using the feedback in class, I soon noticed an improvement in their performance over time. This improvement was mostly evident in their final test. Although they still made errors, these were less than prior exams. This could also be linked to many factors, such as the content and type of exam; however, the topics evaluated were complex (try getting no mistake with contents like future perfect simple, future continuous, and reported speech -statements, questions, and requests).
Monitoring students’ progress was one of the most challenging things I did. It required time to keep the chart updated after having written good quality feedback. Albeit useful, this approach to assessment might be time consuming, specially if, besides the admin work, such as planning and students report, you must teach various groups. I completely understand why many teachers stay with merely grading, as dedicating time to write suggestions and explanations with the process and tasks of a students’ exercise is exhausting. This is why I recommend:
Applying this method to those classes most in need of it. Starting small with a group of students you think might benefit most from this approach and then, once you get the hang of it, the feedback writing process gets easier, as you develop a system and a language to provide it.
Decide with which tasks you will provide this type of feedback. I normally write quality feedback on written work such as essays, oral presentations, reports. For grammar or vocabulary, I point out the mistakes, make one comment or two of the aspects they must revisit and return the papers for them to find the solution or discuss with their peers what they got wrong. It’s worked pretty well, as students do not see a score, they do not compete or appear to feel bad to ask for help.
In addition to the articles I mentioned above, I strongly recommend reading two books:
Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers. Routledge. (Read chapter 7 for more on Feedback)
Feldman, J. (2019). Grading for equity. SAGE. (Read chapters 12 and 13, for more on Standard-based grading and feedback respectively).