Building Feedback into Teaching: Goals/Intentions; Strengths & Weaknesses

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From the course by Commonwealth Education Trust

Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Introduction to Student Assessment

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Commonwealth Education Trust

Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Introduction to Student Assessment

82 ratings

The Foundations of Teaching for Learning programme is for anyone who is teaching, or who would like to teach, in any subject and any context - be it at school, at home or in the workplace. With dynamic lessons taught by established and respected professionals from across the Commonwealth, this eight course programme will see you develop and strengthen your skills in teaching, professionalism, assessment, and more. As you carry on through the programme, you will find yourself strengthening not only your skills, but your connection with colleagues across the globe. A professional development opportunity not to be missed. There are various techniques which help to assess student learning. This course helps teacher to acquire the skills to develop and use appropriate assessment procedures. Enhance your course by joining the Commonwealth teaching community on our website, Facebook and Twitter.

From the lesson

The nature of feedback in improving teaching and learning

Feedback can vary greatly in its effectiveness. In the lectures this week we will identify the key characteristics of good (and bad) feedback. We will explore the practice of incorporating feedback into teaching. Teachers and students have their own views on what constitutes effective feedback. Understanding these views can help you to decide how you should give feedback to your own students. We will ask you to consider how you can best provide feedback to minority students. By the end of the week you should be able to generate your own examples of effective feedback for students.

Feedback Effectiveness: Hattie & Timperley’s framework; Gan’s Question prompts12:31

Building Feedback into Teaching: Goals/Intentions; Strengths & Weaknesses12:11

Teacher & Student perceptions of feedback9:47

Cultural Concern: Perspectives of minorities on appropriate feedback mechanisms11:00

Interview 113:01

Meet the Instructors

Dr Peter Keegan
Senior Lecturer, Te Puna Wānanga, Faculty of Education
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Associate Professor Gavin Brown
Director, Faculty of Education Quantitative Data Analysis and Research Unit
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Professor John MacBeath
Professor Emeritus
University of Cambridge, UK

[MUSIC]

Welcome again to week two of this course on assessment.

The theme this week is feedback,

and this topic, number two, is about building feedback into your teaching,

clarifying goals and intentions and being able to identify strengths and weaknesses.

In our curriculum map again, I remind you that feedback has

to do with the quality and validity of the whole assessment.

Learning intentions are an important aspect of good teaching.

Teaching gets its goals from the curriculum.

We have to have a clear understanding as teachers as

to what we want learners to learn, to do, or to understand.

We need to be able to describe that.

And to the extent that we can do that, we then have a basis for designing

assessments that align to those skills, or abilities,

or knowledge that we've identified as the learning targets.

And once we have that information from assessment, our teaching plans

can be modified to close the gap by providing the next steps.

And of course, feedback to administrators, to school

leaders, to parents, even to the students - depends on being

able to say what was the relationship between the

performance relative to the learning intention derived from the curriculum,

and what the school, the student and the teacher have decided to do next about it.

And in this screen, which is a screen shot of a piece of feedback that

students have been given in a New Zealand high school setting. The

feedback diagram shows a set of assessment criteria given by

the teacher, derived from the national curriculum statements

for learning English at about Grade 11 in New Zealand.

That's the 15 year old English curriculum.

And it shows the student has marked

another student's piece of work, using these criteria.

And the student has written some comments,

which you can study in the PowerPoint slide.

And the teachers studied these comments, looked at

the piece of work, and offered an alternative interpretation.

The teachers commented on the strength that the

student had in the piece of work, and then

suggested actually that overall the quality of the work

was not as high as the student has suggested.

But throughout this process, the teacher has focused on the characteristics of the

work relative to the learning intention or criteria given for this type of work.

The teacher hasn't commented on the honesty or intelligence or even

the hard work of either the writer or the student marker.

The teacher has kept the focus on the task and the process of writing.

And this is the kind of style of feedback

that has been shown to be effective for learning,

in this case not just for the writer, but also for the student marker.

It's important to remember that feedback is a social process.

Feedback doesn't exist in isolation from being human.

The teacher gives feedback, and students

sometimes experience that feedback quite emotionally

and some students have even said, "Well, she gave me this

negative feedback, it must mean she doesn't like me", when in

fact all the teacher is trying to do is to communicate: "Here's

where you are, this is what you have to do next."

So, it's really important that both

receivers and givers concentrate on making sure

the social relationships and the social

aspects of giving good feedback don't interfere.

Often learners have quite a different understanding

of what counts as good quality work.

A lot of students will substitute effort for quality.

They'll say, "I worked really hard.

I worked long hours.

I went to the library.

I did lots of work."

But actually lots of work doesn't necessarily mean it's good work.

Indeed, lack of effort is also not an indicator of poor quality.

My father was always angry at me in high school for not doing enough work, and

my teachers shouldn't have been giving me As

at school because I wasn't working hard enough.

And so this whole relationship of effort and quality are quite independent.

So, students need feedback on how to judge the quality of their own work.

They need information from much more expert

and competent people to grow in their ability.

That's what the teacher is for.

And the teacher's job is to say, "Yes, your work

doesn't meet the standard, and here's how you can improve."

Without that step, the teacher is simply a judge,

rather than an assistant or a facilitator or a teacher.

What we know is that teachers and students

want to improve in their learning and teaching.

Almost everybody involved in schooling is

constantly, if not asking themselves deliberately, but

somewhere in their minds is the question, "How could I do this better?"

And that's the sign of a good teacher and a good student.

How could I do this better?

One of the challenges of educational assessment is

can tests be used to contribute to answering that question.

Unfortunately, a lot of tests only give a percentage correct score.

You got 83% or 27%.

Or they give a rank order score.

You're in the top 10%, or you're in the bottom 33rd% or

some other rank in class, like you're 15th out of 16 in the class.

And this information actually doesn't contribute to giving

feedback because it doesn't answer the question "What

do I have to do next? What was I good at, and what was I weak at?"

It's simply a total score.

We need this information,

so tests that only give us total and rank are insufficient.

And perhaps these kinds of grading systems and testing systems have got a bad

grade simple because-- sorry, they've got a

bad reputation simply because they've failed to communicate.

Tests and grades seem to have gotten a bad reputation simply because

they don't tell teachers or students enough information on how to improve.

However, relying only on my teacher interaction or comments from my

peers or classmates is probably not enough to guide my learning.

Tests can still be useful, and we want to

talk about how tests can be turned into feedback mechanisms.

If all test questions have been linked to curriculum achievement objectives

or learning targets or unit goals, then it becomes easier

to look at performance on those test questions and say, "How

did you do on the various learning goals of this test?"

And those scores can make visible relative

strengths or weaknesses and identify teachable areas.

And tests can provide direct feedback to the teacher, "How did your class go?"

To the student, "How did I go?"

To parents, "How did my child go?"

And even school leaders, "How did this grade go?"

If tests focus on learning objectives, rather than how well you behave in class

or as a punishment for having bad

attitudes, then they can be useful for education.

Tests can even be linked to catalogs of teaching

materials and teaching resources, so that as students get

scores in this range, here's the kinds of materials

that can be used to help you build student competence.

To design a good test, though, requires some special effort.

And the simple mechanism that test companies and test agencies

use, and that classroom teachers can use, is a blueprint or a template.

It's a way of designing in advance, "What do I want to appear in my test?"

And on the screen is an example of a test blueprint developed

by one of my colleagues in the University of Macau in Macau, China.

And she's designed this test to

cover recall, comprehension, and application skills

and to cover the content of chapters one and two and

some integrated knowledge related to chapters one and two of the textbook.

And she's decided how many items for each cell, how many recall,

how many comprehension, how many application for chapter one and so on.

And this kind of blueprint allows her to strategically

design the assessment that she's going to give to her

class to check that these students can do the

important things that she has decided were the teaching goals.

And on screen now, we've given you an example of how you could

use a template to design a reasonably short test.

This template, we would suggest to cover four areas of something that

you're teaching, would be suitable for a 30 to 40 minute test.

And it allows you to identify what those areas are,

and how many questions of different types you're going to use.

Remember, we're going to come to those different types later in this course.

But a template like this allows you to think about "What was so important I

should ask everybody in the class about this skill or this knowledge?"

And then based on how they do on those questions,

you can get a profile of their strengths and weaknesses.

So, these templates become a mechanism by which you can design your

own classroom tests and still use them to identify strengths and weaknesses.

Later in this course, we're going to give you more ideas on how you can use

a test devised with a template to provide

feedback when you report to parents or school leaders.

We are looking forward to telling you more, also, in the next session about how

students and teachers experience assessment in the research

we've done in various parts of the world.

[MUSIC]

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