Present

​ISTE Standard:
4b. 
Help educators use digital tools to create effective assessments that provide timely feedback and support personalized learning.
Timely, specific and kind feedback is one of the most powerful way to engage students and encourage them to drive their own education process. Teachers know that feedback is important for teaching and learning. Unfortunately, most us have far too many students to make it realistic to provide individual, face-to-face feedback. 
Decades of education research support the idea that by teaching less and providing more feedback, we can produce greater learning (see Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Hattie, 2008; Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock

What are the key elements of effective student feedback?

Goal  - Informed
Students are aware of the goal they are trying to accomplish by educational activity. For Example: students practice solving applications problems for projectile motion. The goal is to apply skills they've acquired  during lessons to solve real world problems about projectile motion.  If your students are not clear on their goals, they cannot get helpful feedback. In school, learners are often unclear about the specific goal of a task or lesson, so it is crucial to remind them about the goal and the criteria by which they should self-assess. 

Relevant and Clear

Any useful feedback system involves not only a clear goal, but also tangible results related to the goal. People laugh, chuckle, or don't laugh at each joke; students are highly attentive, somewhat attentive, or inattentive to my teaching. The best feedback is so tangible that anyone who has a goal can learn from it.
Actionable
Effective feedback is concrete, specific, and useful; it provides actionable information. Thus, "Good job!" and "You did that wrong" and B+ are not feedback at all. Effective teachers know that in complex performance situations, actionable feedback about what went right is as important as feedback about what didn't work. Be specific in your feedback what could be improved. 

Timely
Technology is one powerful tool—part of the power of computer-assisted learning is unlimited, timely feedback and opportunities to use it. Peer review is another strategy for managing the load to ensure lots of timely feedback; it's essential, however, to train students to do small-group peer review to high standards, without immature criticisms or unhelpful praise.

Consistent
To be useful, feedback must be consistent. Teachers have to be on the same page about what high-quality work is. Teachers need to look at student work together, becoming more consistent over time and formalizing their judgments in highly descriptive rubrics supported by anchor products and performances. By extension, if we want student-to-student feedback to be more helpful, students have to be trained to be consistent the same way we train teachers, using the same exemplars and rubrics.


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