Giving Feedback To Your Students

Receiving feedback is an essential part of student learning and improvement. There are many approaches to how you give feedback to your students in your course, and the approach you choose should be an approach that suits your teaching style and the needs of your students.

Types of Feedback

The two predominant types of feedback are formative and summative. Formative can be viewed as feedback meant for revising, such as feedback on a draft or a low-stakes assignment. Think of it as the rest stop in a journey. Summative feedback is typically feedback on an assignment or project designed as a way for students to show their mastery. A typical example of a summative assessment is a final exam or project. You can read more about the different types of feedback here. Together, formative and summative feedback will help your students build on their work and understand how their work connects with the larger picture of the class.

Feedback can come in many different forms. The types of feeddback you give in your course will vary depending on your students needs, the assignment type, and your style:

• Personalized Feedback
• Automated Feedback
• Collective Feedback
• Peer Review

Check out our Real Time Connections Online: Feedback page to learn more about each type of feedback and how to make it happen in Canvas.

What will be different: the way your class community is built

• Feedback should center around what the student can do next. For formative feedback, this could be actionable steps for their next assignment. For summative feedback, it can be framed more broadly for future endeavors the student may take on.
• Feedback doesn’t equate to criticism. When discussing any weaknesses in student work, it is best to explore it through questions and how the weakness can be improved. If you find that written feedback doesn’t fully encapsulate the right tone, consider scheduling one-to-one meetings with students or recording audio or video feedback.
• Find balance. Give feedback when it matters. It’s not necessary to give in-depth feedback for everything -- it will burn your students out and it will certainly burn you out as well! Think about the assignments in your course where in-depth feedback could really impact your students’ future work.

Tools for Feedback

• Use Canvas. Canvas offers tools to help you give just-in-time feedback within small assignments. You can set feedback, based on student responses, to automatically appear after a student finishes a quiz. Providing feedback is also easy through Canvas’ Speedgrader tool. Check out our Instructional Technology Group’s guides or schedule an appointment with them here.
• Communicate expectations using rubrics. Rubrics are a good way to indicate to your students what’s important in your assignment. It’s also a way to maintain consistency when multiple members of the teaching staff are grading the same assignment. Here are some tips for creating and using rubrics in your class.