Feedback to Students: What to Say So They Actually Use It
Why it's worth thinking about
A teacher gives feedback dozens of times a lesson: "well done", "that's wrong", "think again", red pen in an exercise book. Most of it goes straight past students. That isn't because they're bad students. It's because feedback often doesn't tell them what to do next.
Good feedback is feedback a student can use. Everything else is just a grade.
Four signs of useful feedback
1. It's specific. "Nicely written" tells the student nothing. "In your second paragraph you gave an example that proves your point, and that's exactly what to do" tells them what to repeat.
2. It's about the task, not the person. "You're careless" is about the person, and there's nothing they can do with it. "In three of the five problems the minus sign got lost when you moved a term across" is about the work, and it shows where to look.
3. It points forward. Not just "what's wrong" but "what to do": "Check every step where you move a term: underline the sign before and after."
4. There's a chance to act on it. If feedback arrives after the topic is closed, students read it and forget it. If they have time to redo the work, they use it.
Responding to answers out loud
The most common feedback is your response to an answer in class. A few techniques:
Praise with a reason. Instead of "correct", say "correct, and you checked it by substituting the answer back in." The student knows exactly what was good, and the class hears a model.
Ask about the cause of a mistake. Instead of "wrong, who knows?", say "How did you get 24? Talk me through it." Students often find the mistake themselves as they explain. If they don't, you learn where the reasoning broke.
Push for precision. An answer that's "almost right" isn't a reason to move on. "Yes, it's to do with temperature. How exactly?" Students learn that "roughly" isn't an answer yet.
Use one student's mistake for the whole class. A typical mistake by one student is nearly always a mistake several others are making. "Maria's answer gives us a good question. Let's look at why it seems that way."
Written feedback
- Don't correct everything. Nobody reads twenty red marks on a page. Pick the two or three things that matter most.
- Comments matter more than grades. When a grade sits next to a comment, many students only look at the grade. Try sometimes handing work back with comments first and the grade later.
- Give time to act on comments. Ten minutes in the next lesson: read the comment and fix one thing. Then the comment becomes part of learning.
Peer feedback
Students can give each other feedback if they have criteria. "Check your partner's work: Is there a conclusion? Is there an example? Do the units match?" Without criteria, peer feedback turns into "fine" or "bad".
Feedback in games
Games give instant feedback: a correct pair changes colour, and a wrong answer shows the right one. That's good for fluency but not much use for understanding. So after a game, spend two minutes talking about which questions were hard and why. If you set the game with "Assign to class", the by-question results show where the whole class went wrong, and that's your material for feedback in the next lesson. Ready-made games by subject are in the game library.
Checking yourself
Listen to ten minutes of your own lesson and write down every response you give to an answer. How many were "right / wrong / well done", and how many came with a reason or a question? There's more on this in How to review your own lesson without the stress.