At times, the whole world seems to be falling to pieces around us. Yet, the expectation is that we carry on and do our best to get through the crisis remains – and this expectation is right, as learners are looking towards educators for guidance and for a way through. I see it as our duty to ensure that the interruption to education is as minimal as possible and we’re all stepping up to try to do our bit. That’s why we’re doing the Oxford English Assessment Professional Development conference, to provide professional development to teachers who want to know more about assessment. Continue reading →
Effective feedback is the key to successful assessment for learning, and can greatly improve your students’ understanding. So how can you ensure that your feedback is as effective as possible? You need to understand what level your students are at and where they need to improve. Your students will also find your feedback more useful if they understand the purpose of what they are learning and know what success looks like.
Try these 5 tips to improve feedback in your classroom:
1. Ask questions to elicit a deeper understanding
Most questions asked in the classroom are simple recall questions (‘What is a noun?’) or procedural questions (‘Where’s your book?’). Higher-order questions require students to make comparisons, speculate, and hypothesize. By asking more of these questions, you can learn more about the way your students understand and process language, and provide better feedback.
2. Increase wait time
Did you know that most teachers wait for less than a second after asking a question before they say something else? Instead of waiting longer, they often re-phrase the question, continue talking or select a student to answer it. This does not give students time to develop their answers or think deeply about the question. Try waiting just 3 seconds after a recall question and 10 seconds after a higher-order question to greatly improve your students’ answers.
3. Encourage feedback from your students
Asking questions should be a two-way process, where students are able to ask the teacher about issues they don’t understand. However, nervous or shy students often struggle to do so. Encourage students to ask more questions by asking them to come up with questions in groups, or write questions down and hand them in after class.
4. Help students understand what they are learning
Students perform better if they understand the purpose of what they are learning. Encourage students to think about why they are learning by linking each lesson back to what has been learned already and regularly asking questions about learning intentions.
5. Help students understand the value of feedback
If students recognise the standard they are trying to achieve, they respond to feedback better and appreciate how it will help them progress. Try improving students’ understanding by explaining the criteria for success. You can also provide examples of successful work and work that could be improved for your students to compare.
Did you find this article useful? For more information and advice, read our position paper on Effective Feedback:
Chris Robson graduated from the University of Oxford in 2016 with a degree in English Literature, before beginning an internship at Oxford University Press shortly afterwards. After joining ELT Marketing full time to work with our secondary products, including Project Explore, he is now focused on empowering the global ELT community through delivery of our position papers.
Assessment for learning (AfL) is a catchphrase with which many
teachers may be familiar and yet may not feel confident that they know what it
means in terms of classroom practice. Here I outline the basic ideas behind it
and the kinds of classroom practices AfL may involve.
At heart, it’s what good teachers do every day:
they gather information about where learners are
in their learning, what they know and don’t know;
they help their students understand what, and
why, they are learning and what successful performance will look like;
they give feedback which helps learners ‘close
the gap’ between where they are in their learning and where they need to get
to;
they encourage learners to become more
self-regulating and reflective.
The evidence is that, done well, these practices are among
the most effective ways of improving learning and outcomes.
Assessment in this process is essentially informal, the
information teachers gather comes in many forms, for example, through classroom
dialogue, following up on unexpected answers, or recognising from puzzled looks
that the students have not understood. Tests play a part, but only if they are
used to feed directly into the teaching and learning process.
What would we expect to see in an AfL classroom?
Diagnostics. There
would beevidence of teaching and
learning that is active, with
students involved in dialogue with their teachers and classmates. This goes
beyond simple recall questions and will include seeking out students’ views
(‘what do you think….) and giving them time to think about their answers –
often with a classmate (‘pair and share’).
Clarity about learning
intentions. This requires teachers to be clear about what is to be learned,
how the lesson activities will encourage it, and where it fits in the learning
progression. They then seek to make this clear to their students by linking it
to what they have learned already and showing why it’s important. Expert
teachers will use imaginative ways of introducing the learning intentions (‘why
do you think we’re doing this?’) rather than routinely writing out the learning
objectives.
Teachers will also clarify what a successful performance
will look like, so that the learners can see the standard they need to achieve.
Teachers may do this by negotiating
with the class about what the learners think a good performance might involve
(for example: ‘what would you look for in a good oral presentation?’). Another
approach may be to exemplify the
standard by using examples of work (best as anonymous work from other
students). A teacher may give the class two pieces of work, she may then give
the class the criteria for assessing the work (no more than two or three key
criteria) and ask them, in groups, to make a judgement about their relative
quality. This also provides a vital step in being able to evaluate the quality
of their own work and become more self-regulated learners.
Giving effective feedback.Providing feedback that moves learning forward is a key, and complex, teaching skill. We know from research that feedback is hard to get right. Good feedback ‘closes the gap’ between a learner’s current performance and the standard that is to be achieved. Some of the key features in quality feedback are:
It recognises what has been done well and then
gives specific advice on what step
the learner can take next. General comments such as ‘try harder’, ‘improve your
handwriting’, or 7/10, do not provide the detail needed.
It is clear
and well-timed. The teacher gives feedback
in language the learner understands and it is given when it is most useful.
It relates
to the success criteria and focuses on the key next steps. We may sometimes
give too much feedback if we start to comment on presentational features (e.g.
spelling) when these were not part of the learning intention.
It involves action
and is achievable.
In all this, the aim of
assessment for learning is to encourage our students to increasingly think for
themselves, and have the ability and desire to regulate their own learning.
Gordon Stobartis an assessment expert that has contributed to the latest Position Paper for Oxford University Press, ‘Assessment for Learning’. Download the paper today to learn about effective feedback, close the gap between where your learners are and where they need to be, and get access to exclusive professional development events!
Gordon Stobart is Emeritus Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London, and an honorary research fellow at the University of Oxford. Having worked as a secondary school teacher and an educational psychologist, he spent twenty years as a senior policy researcher. He was a founder member of the Assessment Reform Group, which has promoted assessment for learning internationally. Gordon is the lead author of our Assessment for Learning Position Paper.
There’s an elephant in the room!
Effective feedback is the key to successful assessment for learning, and can greatly improve your students’ understanding. So how can you ensure that your feedback is as effective as possible? You need to understand what level your students are at and where they need to improve. Your students will also find your feedback more useful if they understand the purpose of what they are learning and know what success looks like.
