Providing Learner-Centered Feedback-2

Another strategy that can have a positive impact on the effectiveness of your feedback is making sure it is learner-centered. Learner-centered feedback is personalized to the students in your course. Rather than providing feedback on the assignment itself, you can add some elements of personalization in your feedback.

Understanding the Student

How can you do this? First, it helps to understand the student’s personal situation, family background, and school goals. For example, adult learners have different perspectives and bring with them work and life experiences that can be used as a basis for providing feedback that may add value to their lives. You can get to know this information by asking about it through introductions, observing discussion board responses, and other comments that students may send to you in private or public message forums.

So, when you provide feedback, think about factors and strategies that may help address the student’s big picture goals.

You want to try to also “know” the student as well. What are some strengths of the student and what areas do they need to improve on? You may want to take notes from assignment to assignment to track progress and development while identifying common themes. This can be much easier if you are teaching courses where you will have the same students, such as a "Communication 101" and "Communication 102" course. You may want to make administrative requests to follow or stay with the same groups of students if possible.

By keeping track of student progress, you will be able to connect new feedback you provide to past assignments. For example, you might comment about some progress you see the student making in week five based on the feedback you provided in week two.

Generalizing Skills in Feedback

Also, consider providing feedback on skills that can generalize to other courses and settings. You can provide assignment specific feedback, but are you able to provide feedback that can transfer to the next set of assignments? Or provide feedback in a way that may promote development in other courses?

It is also important to highlight what is possible for the student by using the feedback to point out how it may relate to the potential for improved outcomes. So, talk about how the feedback you provide is going to be useful later.

Following Up on Feedback

It is also important to acknowledge when feedback seems to be accepted and implemented by students. Instructors often feel that students may not accept or follow their feedback, but when it does happen, you should make a special effort to point it out. You may want to highlight in your response to students how you have noticed an improvement in their assignments. Additionally, providing positive reinforcement and noticing the improvements can be a good practice to motivate and engage students. Remember to not comment just on the writing, but also on the student’s ideas and how they have been expressed.

Personalization Techniques

One thing that can help make the feedback more about the learner is the use of personalization techniques. For example, one easy thing you can implement now is to include the student’s preferred name when responding to them. You should also consider incorporating the use of audio feedback to help make it feel more personalized for your students. Multiple studies have shown that students believe audio feedback to be more detailed, personal, in-depth, specific, and constructive than textbased feedback. You can use the phrase “we” in providing feedback as well to signal that it is a collaborative process. Also, sometimes asking students what feedback is helpful for them can be very beneficial for learning and knowing more about your own feedback practices and the impact it has on student learning.

Revision Opportunities

Oftentimes, students are only given one opportunity at an assignment for a grade. However, this doesn’t give them the opportunity to improve through revisions that are guided by appropriate feedback. Some instructors find benefit in allowing students to make revisions to their work after the initial feedback has been provided, and re-submit the work for review. Often, instructors will let students earn partial credit, such as up to 10% of the total score, for updating the assignment response based on feedback.

For example, if there is an essay question that you identified as needing further explanation and detail, a student could submit an updated paragraph or section describing and addressing this comment. Or, they may submit an updated version of a math question showing the corrected work. This can take some additional time to review and provide feedback on, so it is important to consider how often and for which assignments you would use this technique in. But it can be one way of making sure your feedback is addressed. This process can also be used when working towards a final project, such as writing and drafting one section of the final report that will eventually be included in the final version.