Quality feedback practices

Managing feedback for learning

  • Moodle quizzes. Set up at the end of each topic or a theme, a short quiz that students can complete as many times as necessary to achieve the standard set. This provides students with feedback on their understanding and application of learning for that theme.
  • General feedback for learning activities. Consider breaking up your face-to-face/online learning activities or narrated presentations with a small comprehension activities or knowledge polls. This provides an opportunity to clarify any concepts or issues with the information presented before students’ progress further.
  • Enabling peer and self-feedback processes. Provide students with regular opportunities to practice the processes of peer and self-feedback. Such skills need to be practiced in order to be effective, so embedding opportunities to consolidate and refine these skills across all units is important.

Managing feedback for assessment

  • Consider using Moodle/Turnitin marking guides and rubrics, and frequently used comments. Although these will take some time to set up initially, they make marking a lot faster in the long run as they reduce double-handling and rewriting/retyping the same thing many times. You can seek assistance from the Centre for Academic Development when developing rubrics and marking guides to help ensure the expectations are clear to students.
  • General feedback for assessments. After grading assessments, you may find that many students have similar areas of strength and/or areas for improvement. If this is the case, you can create written, audio or video feedback that you make available to all students. When grading individual student assessments, you can give them specific feedback but point them to the general feedback and instruct them to read/listen to/watch particular parts.
  • Set up questions banks for quizzes. This is best practice rather than adding them directly into a quiz. It makes it easier to mix and match and have control over the order if content changes in sequence. Set up categories based on topic (not ‘Week #’) and avoid question names such as ‘Question 1’, ‘Questions 2’ etc. to allow for randomised questions without confusion.

Resources, strategies or assistance

Websites

Assistance

To explore ways in which you can improve the effectiveness of the language you use to provide student feedback, contact your Institute Learning Skills Advisor.