[MUSIC] Welcome to week two of this course on assessment. The theme of this week's course is feedback. And today, we're going to specifically look at how different kinds of feedback are effective or less effective and give you some frameworks and prompts for using the most powerful kinds of feedback. Looking at our curriculum framework in terms of understanding assessment, feedback has to do with the validity aspect of assessment. Assessments depend on giving you, the teacher and the students, useful information about who needs to be taught what. And that feedback that we receive as teachers, we process and turn it into feedback to our students. And if we get that process wrong, then it really doesn't matter how good our test was or how good our scoring was, if our communicating of results is inappropriate, then our assessment practices have lost validity. An important framework that has been developed here in New Zealand by John Hattie and Helen Timperley over the last ten years, says that the purpose of feedback is to reduce the discrepancy between where students are and where we want them to be. That is the goal of teaching, to help students gain in skill, in knowledge, to reach the targets or outcomes or standards that are expected or set for them. Now, the point feedback has to do for the student is the student has to be maintained and increased in their effort to reach that goal. When learning is difficult, and it will always be difficult, when reaching goals is hard, we don't want students to give up on those goals. So, our feedback has to support them in pursuing this goal that we as a society have said is important in the curriculum. At the same time, of course, it's up to the teacher to ensure that the goals are appropriate, not too hard, not too easy, that they're appropriately challenging. And to give feedback to the students that will help them maintain their effort to reach these difficult goals. And the Hattie & Timperley model says that there are three key questions involved in good feedback. The first question is very simple: where are we going? That is, making clear, reiterating the target, the goal, the outcome that the student is trying to reach. Identifying where are you now, being able to answer the question, "This is where I am relative to the goal", gives us a much clearer ideas about where to go. And the key question that the teacher needs to answer is, "...and this is what you need to do next". We're very comfortable with this framework when we're teaching children how to drive, or when we teach them how to do any skilled process. But when it comes to learning, the marks are much harder to see, "Where am I now, relative to the target", and that's why we need good assessment practices, so that teachers can give good feedback. Hattie and Timperley have gone on to say "Well, there are four levels of feedback as well." There's feedback about the task - how to do this thing that we're learning now. For example, solving algebraic equations, or doing factorization, or learning about photosynthesis and so on. There's also processes that are common across multiple tasks and being able to give feedback about "What is the process skill that you're using?" and "Are you using the right and best process skill?" And then there's a third even more difficult level of feedback to do with helping the student develop the skill to regulate and control their own learning. If students know that there are three or more strategies, they also have to know that "I need to think about the effectiveness of the strategy that I am using. And maybe I can change this strategy. Perhaps a different strategy would work better." And the meta-cognitive process of thinking about my thinking while I am thinking needs support and training from teachers, teachers have to give feedback. And the fourth type of feedback that they have identified is the feedback about self and this is the one that is problematic. We all love to get encouraging comments. We love to be told we're doing well. But research seems to suggest very clearly that if I tell a student you're doing well without identifying exactly where you are relative to the target, and how to get closer to the target, the student actually won't know that they're not at the target, and they wont know what to do about the target. So, a lot of praise type feedback, as natural as it might be, is actually counter-productive, and this is problematic for us. So, the research that Helen and John have done has shown that task feedback, process feedback and self-regulation feedback are all contributing to improve performance. And unfortunately, self-praise oriented feedback does not help the student do better. It doesn't close the gap, it doesn't give information on how to get better. And likewise, blaming students, it's clear you haven't studied enough or you need to work harder. This kind of feedback also does not contribute to improve performance, so what kind of feedback does work? One of John's students, Mark Gann, has done a series of studies with chemistry students in Singapore, teaching them how to give themselves and their classmates positive feedback. And what he's focused on is how giving feedback about the task involves using declarative knowledge: "This is the piece of knowledge that you need." Feedback around processes has to do with the procedures. "Oh, did you remember to do this first? Switch this on before you did that. Did you warm this up? Did you--" and so on and so forth. These kinds of process information allows students to begin to think more about the processes they're using. And helping students understand the meta cognitive and conditional information that they need. When we're doing a process, sometimes it matters the conditions in which we do this process. Think about driving in an urban setting. When you come to a stop light, if you're in America, you're allowed to turn right on a red light. But if you came to a red light in New Zealand, you're not allowed to turn left or right, you have to wait. So, these conditions change the nature of knowledge. And helping students think about what are the conditions that are necessary for this situation for this process leads to greater success. And feedback can come in multiple formats. The more explicit the feedback, the more scaffolded and concrete that feedback, is certainly more useful for beginners and novices. Having clear check lists, probing questions, rubrics and exemplars, are concrete ways that a teacher can give students structure on feedback. But as learners become more expert in a domain, they need less explicit feedback. And Dr. Mark Gann has given us this increasing scale of feedback that is less and less explicit, right down to mnemonics and symbols. And my students, tell me that they have certain mnemonics that remind them how to do a process or what's involved in a process. And sometimes we use symbols when we're giving corrections or feedback to students. And the symbol is very abstract, but there's a complex set of meaning. So, there's different kinds of feedback that should be used in response to the level of skill and ability that learners have. In these next two screenshots, we give you a set of questions developed by Mark Gann to show the kinds of prompts that you could use as a teacher or that students could use to give each other or to give them feedback at each of these three key levels. The level of task, the process, and on the next screen, self regulation. I'm going to give you some time to look at these but remember to download the Powerpoint slides and study them in detail. And think about how you could use them in your teaching. [MUSIC] The key ideas of feedback are not that hard. But what's important here is it's not whether feedback exists or not, it's actually what kind of feedback you give. It's the quality and nature of the feedback. Feedback has been shown to have both positive and negative influences on learning, depending on the content and the manner of that feedback. And certainly feedback needs to be congruent with how we understand learning. Learning involves the active engagement of learners in their own learning. That means students have to be ready for and seek feedback and of course, that means teachers have to be ready to give feedback. Where are you now? Where are you going and what do you need to do next? The challenge for us as teachers is being expert enough to know the answers to those questions for our students. And more of this as we study feedback in the next session. [MUSIC]
