CETL Resources: Critiquing Student Projects

Feedback is simply an evaluative response. It can come from you as the instructor or through peer evaluations. Feedback can be positive, negative, or neutral (or any combination thereof) and come in a variety of formats including verbal, written, and gestures.  Hattie and Timperley’s (2007) four levels of feedback:

• Task Level Feedback
  • This level includes how well a task is being accomplished or performed. This is the most common type of feedback and can inform correctness, behaviors, or other criteria assigned to the task. Task Level Feedback is most powerful when not combined with other levels of feedback and is positive rather than negative.
• Process Level Feedback
  • Process Level Feedback “relates to students’ strategies for error detection” so that they are able to reassess the process and provide their own “self feedback.”
• Self-Regulation Level Feedback
  • “Self-Regulation involves an interplay between commitment, control and confidence. It addresses the way students monitor, direct, and regulate actions toward a learning goal… and involves self-generated thoughts, feelings, and actions that are adapted to the attainment of personal goals.”
• Self as a Person Level Feedback
  • This is included not because it’s effective, but because it is typically the most common form of feedback given to students. This type of feedback contains little to no task-related feedback, but instead addresses the student

Examples of Feedback

The image below (Brooks, et al, 2019) details prompts and strategies to provide quality feedback to your students.

When to Give Feedback

The purpose of timely feedback is so the students use it to reach the desired learning goal.  Feedback on a topic or assignment they no longer have to deal with may be seen as useless. Ultimately, feedback is most useful when students can take what you have said and use it to increase the quality of their work.

How Much Feedback?

It’s natural for many educators to want to fix everything they see. When giving quality feedback, consider the Goldilocks idea, not too hard, not too soft, just right. “For real learning, what makes the difference is a usable amount of information that connects with something students already know and takes them from that point to the next level. Judging the right amount of feedback to give – how much, on how many points – requires deep knowledge and the consideration of the following:

• The topic in general and your learning target or targets in particular
• Typical developmental learning progressions for those topics or targets
• Your individual students

(Brookhart, 2008)

For information on giving feedback with technology, check out the Chronicle's guide, How to Give Your Students Better Feedback With Technology.