Feedback strategies: Engaging students in dialogue
You’ve assigned students a term paper and told them what it should include. Once students have submitted their papers, you psych yourself up to tackle the hours of reading ahead of you. After providing feedback comments on a stack of papers, you’re discouraged: instructions weren’t consistently followed, arguments lack support, some papers don’t even argue anything, and much of the writing hasn’t been proofread. And you wonder what the point is of providing comments that many students will never read once you’ve assigned grades. You rationalize your time on task by telling yourself that the comments justify the grade.
Have you ever had this experience? Are you interested in learning about pedagogically sound and efficient strategies for getting students to better understand your expectations for their assignment submissions? To pay closer attention to assignment instructions? To pay attention to your comments? And for possibly saving you time when marking students’ papers? In this article, we describe strategies that address these questions by involving students in dialogue about their writing assignments from the moment you assign these assignments to the time students submit completed pieces of writing.
In this article:
A dialogue approach: Three types of feed
A dialogue approach to commenting on students’ writing involves a shift from a typical approach where instructors write feedback comments on students’ papers to an approach that involves instructor and student interaction with the comments. It assumes three types of feed: feed up, feed back, and feed forward, each of which is associated with a question for students to reflect on. This approach also assumes that the feeds are intended to promote student learning, an assumption that is in contrast to the use of instructor comments solely to justify assignment grades.
Feed up: Where am I going? | Feed back: How am I doing? | Feed forward: Where to next? |
Students need to know what a writing assignment that meets the criteria looks like so they are not put in a position where they have to guess what their instructors’ expectations are. To allow students to know “where they are going”—in other words, what the target is—instructors should be explicit about what the submission criteria are. Feed up refers to letting students know what the target is. | Students need to know to what extent the writing they have produced meets the criteria, in other words, whether or not they are on target. Instructors should provide feed back that helps students see what gaps exist between the target they were aiming for and the work they handed in. Note that explaining to students how their performance reached or exceeded expectations (i.e., the target) is just as important as commenting on weak areas. To intentionally produce good work in future assignments, students need to know what they have done well. | Students need to know how to close the gap between their current work and the target. Instructor comments feed forward when they help students see how to improve the quality of future work. It is key in this context that students have opportunities to make use of instructor comments in subsequent writing assignments; otherwise, they are simply “dangling data”. |
With a dialogue approach, students are more likely to:
Develop an understanding of how to actually improve their writing.
Act on instructor comments.
Produce work that corresponds to instructor expectations.
Become more independent learners.
As with all types of comments on student work, a dialogue approach requires constructive comments. For guidelines and examples on how to respond constructively to student work, see the Providing Constructive Feedback Rubric.
Four strategies for implementing a dialogue approach
Each of these four strategies incorporates at least one of the three types of feed. We suggest you experiment—start by choosing one strategy that you feel will be especially helpful for getting students to do well on a particular piece of writing you assign. Try it out. See what students think about it. Tweak the implementation for a second try, if necessary. Or experiment with one of the other strategies.
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