Group items tagged

Interesting stuff in this article, from managing what can seem like a torrent of feedback, to thinking about the ways that different people respond to the same comments, to the metacognitive exercise of thinking about your own reactions. It's also worth noting that these tips come from a book that's not just for students - and the techniques might be useful for faculty and staff too.

This week in our Small Teaching book club, we were discussing the value of monitored practice versus the stress that public feedback can generate in classrooms. Here, John Warner makes some observations about private and monitored practice and suggests that real time feedback is best suited to honing discrete skills

"The value in feedback from students lies in considering the centrality of experience." The author applies John Locke's concept of "primary" (i.e. objective) and "secondary" (i.e. subjective) qualities to course evaluations.

"Can "light-touch, targeted feedback" to students via email improve their perceptions of and performance in a class? New research says in some cases the answer is yes."

Would emojis, bitmojis, or memes be useful ways for you to deliver quick bursts of (positive) feedback?

A broad ranging survey of best practices, unlikely successes, and unacknowledged challenges in the critique of student work that stresses the importance of authentic communication that directs both the students and the instructors themselves on how to improve their work.

From the article: "Exam wrappers are short activities that direct students to review their performance (and the instructor's feedback) on an exam with an eye toward adapting their future learning... Exam wrappers ask students three kinds of questions: How did they prepare for the exam? What kind of errors did they make on the exam? What could they do differently next time?"

Good tips for structuring peer review exercises so that they provide the feedback (and builde skills at attentive reading) which students need.

Covers the adoption of clickers for instant feedback in a broad range of venues, including such diverse places as fire departments, churches, cruise ships and schools. 

A description of the author's process for grading with his iPad. The comments section includes some good alternatives, including Word's "Track Changes" feature, as well as a few suggestions of classroom strategies which improve students' receptiveness to paperless feedback.

Mastery learning promises more individualized educational experiences within a class. Students who reach a benchmark of skill or content mastery can move on to the next unit, allowing them a deeper educational experience; students who struggle get more opportunities for review and feedback. It's extremely challenging to build a syllabus this way; this article cites some educators who are finding that the flipped classroom model can also aid a mastery learning orientation. If this all sounds like too much chaotic change, it might be worth considering whether particular elements of a course could be converted to a mastery orientation, without upsetting the whole apple cart.

Everyone's looking for a way to make grading more efficient without sacrificing effectiveness. Most of these tips boil down to finding ways to make feedback engaging, usually by focusing on things the student can do to improve (in a rewrite or on the next assignment).

Our discussions about writing often come around to whether students actually read (and internalize) the comments. Sometimes we hear about students not knowing how to turn on Track Changes or the GradeMark panel in Turnitin, so at the most basic level electronic comments do introduce friction for some students. What do you think of the research project proposed here - do students actually approach electronic feedback differently?

An example assignment from the HASTAC Pedagogy Project suggests having students submit their bibliographies in process to peer review. Getting students to review one another's sources can help them think about their own, and breaking out the research step fights the tendency to write the whole paper at the last minute. (A similar collaborative feature is available in RefWorks, a web-based citation manager available through Kenyon LBIS.)

Some tips on using new technologies to give meaningful feedback on writing assignments while completing the work in a reasonable time frame.

Good review of the literature around the concept of "grit." Most of this literature focuses on students and I'm intrigued to see the call that we have to look closer at grit in the faculty life cycle too, with its ongoing opportunities for negative feedback.

As you think about adding your course-specific questions to the college evaluation form, what feedback will be most useful to you? (The start-stop-continue framework referenced in this article sounds promising.)

Using Google Docs to share work in a writing workshop seems straightforward enough; the idea of collecting and reviewing feedback through a Google Form is an interesting twist.

This testimonial brings up a crucial aspect of course design--making sure that you have reasonable expectations for your own workload when developing activities that require significant amounts of direction and feedback from the instructor.

Interesting review of a new book on writing pedagogy. The central message of the book appears to be one which I've heard many Kenyon faculty members discuss - deliver only a few critical messages to a student per writing exercise, based on their current stage of writing development. There's a much better chance that the student will take those one or two lessons to heart than if they're hidden in feedback which bleeds red ink.