The power of feedback banks
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I've seen a few folks sharing marking practices (including some talking about feedback banks!). I thought I'd write up something explaining these, how they help mark more smoothly and potentially with richer feedback and crucially how this itself can be a data source about your students. So let's get into it! aside: you may like to read my prior post: feedback is for learning. What are feedback banks?In essence they are just an organised list of pre written blocks of feedback that you can search through for a relevant item, combine together into a coherent statement Below is an example of feedback for a scenario where participants spoke about scaffolding student thinking using a sequence of questions this questioning is an effective means of directing student thinking. When we as the teacher adopt a curious mindset as we listen to our student's thinking process we can often observe where a student is getting stuck and ask just the right question to help them identify for themselves what's going on. It's a great way to encourage some reflective thinking and often far better than simply telling them the answer. Adjacent to this could also be how one gets a student engaged in this process -- for instance they might ask about X and we say "in order to understand X, I want to first make sure we have a good grasp of Y, what is your understanding of..." and then we have in essence permission to take them on a journey around foundational concepts to help them grasp the solution to their query. Either use case of this practice can be applied for a whole class level as part of a recap on key concepts, analysis of an activity, etc. in addition to an individual student or group level. Regardless of the exact use case, this is a useful approach and one that can certainly support our students This is probably a longish one as even for the same question I might pick out several to join together but still gives a sense of what might be found in a feedback bank. How did I get into feedback banks?Interestingly enough, this was one of the first things I started doing after only a few years of tutoring. I was marking my algorithms students and had noticed a lot of patterns within student work. Many of them might misunderstand a particular use case, or I might notice they use one of a few key algorithms, they might have designed for a really great use of memory or carefully avoided recalculating the same thing, etc. After noticing this I took to setting up a spreadsheet (because of course I did, spreadsheets are one of my most capitalist/efficiency-friendly special interests 😂). I would note the unique scenarios which would show up in the students work and the first time I saw it I would write up a really detailed and specific block of feedback for that specific part and by the end of it, usually all I had to do was tick off the scenarios and combine together the relevant pre written feedback blocks into a cohesive piece for that student which was detailed and specific to their work. As a consequence I think I tended to have the most detailed feedback of the team but also somehow was the fastest to mark (I didn't even realise at the time that other people didn't do the same!) Why use them?Fundamentally, it does take a while to write up detailed and useful feedback. It needs to be specific to the student's work, directed in how to improve, timely. If you only had to mark a single student this would not be a problem, you could invest deeply. The problem arises in a system where one teacher is expected to mark more and more with less and less time. For now we ignore the fundamental issue with that (unusual for me to say, I know!) because that's not what this post is about. In this context though, what usually happens is markers limit how much feedback they give so they can prioritise the number given to the students, this is exemplified in feedback like “good work”, or “need to follow APA standards”. Instead the feedback bank allows you to write really good feedback just once. If you have 20+ students (and let's be honest, if you're thinking about doing this you probably have at least 60 if not more) it definitely returns the initial time as most unique scenarios will come up over that cohort. Plus, they can even be adapted for related contexts or changed versions of future assessments. How can they help with feedback quality?Again because you focus on writing the really detailed feedback once, you can put a lot more work into making it helpful for your students. Lots of students are confused by this point? I'll make a diagram and include that for all of them! Lots of students aced this part? Cool I'll find some neat links for how to take it to the next level for all of them. Here's the kicker though, you can share your feedback bank across a teaching team, if you have 25 tutors (yes I've taught subjects with 25 and I know of subjects with even more than that), you can ask them to use a shared feedback bank and when they find new scenarios they let you know and you collaborate to write a really good response together that everyone can use from then onwards. Now your whole teaching team is providing really detailed feedback which you feel confident will help your students grow What can't a feedback bank cover?The things that will never get caught are things that don't have patterns. A lot of elements of students approach will be captured but each student has their personal goals, motivations, dreams. If you want to truly connect with your students and motivate them, you actually need to align the work with those personal student goals. Thinking in scale you could keep a record of that information but that aspect would have to be bespoke per student, that said it's not an all or nothing. You can do both things. Both have the feedback bank for patterns, as well as customising other parts to what would feel real for that student particularly And finally, how can they be a data source?Well let's remember what it is that the feedback bank actually is. It's a set of all the unique scenarios in parts of your students’ work. Purely looking at this as it is will give you an overview of the sorts of things your students do in this work. Crucially though, we can add a new feature to this, a simple count. For each block of feedback, keep count of the number of times you use it. The first time you write it up, it's been used once because that student was the one who needed it. Every time you copy it in, you increase the count by one. After you've finished marking, look at the top few cases and you know what the common strengths and weaknesses are for your cohort specifically. For every single feedback block, you can now see how frequently they come up. This is powerful information. Common mistakes can suggest things like:
And a few other possible implications. With that information we are empowered to act because we can then change what comes next in the sequence for students, we can prepare tip sheets and guidelines, we can even share out messages to the whole cohort to say things like “Hey we noticed a lot of students had difficulty with XYZ” which can lead into aggregate feedback early for students or even just validating for them that they weren't the only one What about yourself? Have you ever used feedback banks? And further, have you ever analysed how you use them? What will you do with this information? |