Giving constructive and meaningful feedback – how do you teach students?
How do you actually give constructive feedback? Giving feedback is a skill that students need to develop, but one that often receives little attention in higher education. Students do know how to give feedback, right?
Practice proves otherwise: lecturers within the UvA in recent years indicate that feedback from students in the UvA Q is particularly negatively worded – and thus not very constructive. In addition, the feedback is often too brief, general or insufficiently critical to be properly processed.
In recent educational research, increasing attention is being paid to developing learners’ feedback literacy: giving, receiving and processing feedback. The book Designing Effective Feedback Processes in Higher Education (Winstone & Carless, 2020) contains numerous examples based on scientific research.
In this article, we describe tips for teaching students how to develop this part of their feedback literacy. These tips reflect recommendations from Winstone and Carless’ (2020) book. At the bottom of the page you will find a file with two Powerpoint slides containing information for students that you can put to use immediately.
Tips
1.
Give students concrete tools they can use while formulating feedback. See the slides at the bottom of this page that include steps students can use, you can add these to your own PowerPoint. It helps to briefly visualise and discuss the steps each time students give feedback, it only needs to take a few minutes.
2.
Show students concrete examples, both “good” and “worse,” and encourage them to actively engage with these.
- Ask students to improve the worse examples in small groups using handouts.
- Based on the examples, have the students formulate their own criteria for good feedback.
You can visualise these criteria during the block when the students have to give feedback.
3.
Provide feedback on the quality of student feedback. This can be done at the group level and certainly does not have to be done individually. For example, after a peer review assignment or teaching evaluation, provide feedback on what you noticed about the quality of the feedback. This can be done verbally but also briefly via email or Canvas:
- Did students use the steps/tools you provided?
- How useful was the feedback?
- How constructive was the feedback?
4.
During the meeting, give students space to share their feelings and concerns about giving feedback. Especially when giving peer feedback, there is a lot of uncertainty involved; students (and people in general) find it difficult to give a peer (equal) feedback for a variety of reasons. For example, they feel that they are not experts and that this is necessary to give “good” feedback.
