Education of the republic of uzbekistan tashkent state pedagogical university named after nizami

Making feedback more effective
As an educator, there are many ways to improve the quality of your feedback to make it more effective for the learner. Simple things like not always using ticks to indicate a good point are recommended as students will be more motivated by short words or phrases such as “good work” or “true”. Feedback should be specific – don’t just say ‘good’, explain why, in what respects. It should also be constructive, encouraging, honest, and supportive; and where possible it should be frequent and substantial. Successful feedback should clearly indicate to the student:
1. What aspects of their assessed work are successful, and why
2. What aspects of their assessed work are less successful, and why
3. How the student could improve this particular piece of work
4. How the student could do more successful work in future.
Feedback is also timely, a fact we lecturers often overlook.
It should not be provided too soon, as it could prevent students reflecting on their
work; neither should it be provided too late when it is no longer salient to the
student.
How many times have students thought they were progressing just fine at
interim assessment stages only to find out at the final assessment stage that their
work was not up to the level the feedback they received led them to believe? Clear
and appropriate assessment criteria, that are available to students before their
assessment and can be consulted afterwards, go a long way in helping to address
this problem.
Feedback can be time-consuming, but there are ways to make it more efficient.
• Consider the nature of the feedback students will need to master the concepts and skills for each assignment. How detailed does it have to be? Should it be individual or can it be group feedback? Can it be oral or does it have to be written?
• Use the track and edit tool in Word to speed up feedback and comments on student essays and reports.
• Consider using or creating generic feedback forms.
• Consider audio-taping feedback for learners.
• Provide more detailed solution sets to reveal the appropriate underlying reasoning, to identify potentially misunderstood concepts or principles, and to elaborate how common student errors followed from these misunderstandings.