Student Feedback

Students need feedback to learn from their performance. But what about instructors? How do you gather useful feedback from your students to facilitate continued learning and improvement in your course? Feedback is not only crucial for enhancing your students’ experience but also for tracking your progress as an educator and employee of the University.

Review from ETE Conference 2024

Best Practices

  1. Feedback should be based on clear criteria. Feedback on assignments or in the classroom should be based on clearly communicated criteria for success. 
  2. Feedback should be timely. Feedback on assignments should arrive in time for students to improve their work prior to the next major assessment; otherwise, it's likely they'll make the same mistakes again.
  3. Feedback should be provided on both summative and formative assessments. If possible, it is helpful for students for large assignments and projects to be broken down in to smaller pieces that enable you to provide formative feedback on their work prior to providing summative feedback after the submission of the entire large project.
  4. Feedback should allow for student self-assessment. Self-assessment is vital to the learning process. When students assess their own work, they are engaging in deep thought processes that allow for greater reflection and understanding. Essentially, self-assessment helps students develop their learning skills. As students gain more practice with self-assessment, their confidence will increase, and they will learn how and when to seek feedback from their classmates and instructor. 
  5. Feedback should be relevant. Students should be able to see how the feedback they are receiving will help them to improve their performance in the class. Feedback is only useful for learners if they integrate it in to their learning. Feedback that helps students do better on a subsequent assessment or provides guidance on a revision will be more relevant than feedback on a topic that will not be addressed again in the semester, or if the feedback is on an essay that students cannot revise.

When and How to Gather Feedback

There are numerous ways to gather feedback from your students, both during and outside of class time, directly and indirectly. It’s beneficial to have specific questions in mind when asking for feedback—questions about the last class or a particular assignment. Broad questions like “How do you feel about this course?” are often too vague to yield actionable answers.

Here are some ideas for instructors:

In-Class Review

  1. Active Learning: Break your class into teaching and response sections to create natural opportunities for feedback and adjustment.
  2. Start-of-Class Polls: Begin your class with a poll—not a graded quiz—to wake students up and gauge their understanding and readiness for the next topic. Consider these types of questions:
    • Feelings Questions: “How did you feel about this topic?” or “Was the activity interesting to you?” These questions help indirectly gauge the effectiveness of your instruction.
    • Self-Evaluation Questions: “How confident are you in your ability to _____?” or “Rate your understanding of ______ from 1 (not at all) to 10 (I could teach a class on it).” These can also be framed as teacher-evaluation questions, such as “Did you enjoy the activity yesterday?” but avoid asking “Did I do a good job?”
    • Quiz Questions: Even if ungraded, these can help identify areas where students struggle or excel, informing your teaching strategy.
    • Fun Questions: Unrelated questions like “Which football team are you rooting for this weekend?” can help students relax and engage more honestly with serious questions. They also build familiarity and rapport.

Out-of-Class Review

  1. IDEA Evaluations: End-of-semester IDEA evaluations provide invaluable insights into students’ overall experience. Carefully curate your objectives to get the best results.
  2. Personalized Evaluations: Create your own evaluation criteria for midterm evaluations to address specific or time-sensitive questions about your course. Early feedback can be more accurate for issues from the beginning of the semester.
  3. Assignments: Use assignments to indirectly assess how well students understand or enjoy a topic. Whether graded or ungraded, assignments can provide insights into the effectiveness of your teaching.

Tools for Feedback

There are numerous technology tools available to help you provide feedback to students.  Many of these are provided within Canvas.  A few tools are listed below.  Links to directions are provided to assist your implementation.

Audio/Video Comments: You can provide audio and video feedback (as well as nonverbal feedback) for a student's assignment submission while using the Canvas SpeedGrader tool. Record directly in Canvas to submit your feedback within minutes. How do I leave feedback comments for student submissions in SpeedGrader? Open External Link

Virtual Conferences - Zoom: Zoom allows you to conference with an individual student, a small group, or your entire class. Zoom virtual conferences are a great place to showcase the non-verbal body language that can make students more comfortable in an online class. Getting started with Zoom Open External Link

Canvas Gradebook: You can provide assignment feedback to students through Canvas Grades, which can be utilized even for courses that aren't taught online. Students can view their scores instantly once you submit them. How do I use Grades? Open External Link

Rubrics in Speed Grader: Once you've set up a rubric in an assignment or discussion forum, you can enable its use in the Speed Grader. Each rating level is clickable and will auto-fill the correct point value in the Pts column. You are also able to leave comments per criteria level. How do I use rubrics in Canvas? Open External Link

Speech to Text (only in Chrome): You can use Google Chrome's speech recognition feature to speak your feedback and have the SpeedGrader transcribe it for you. If you have a long comment to provide, this can save a lot of time. How do I use the Speech to Text feature in SpeedGrader with Google Chrome? Open External Link

Canvas Quizzing: For online courses, assign Canvas quizzes that can be auto-graded for students (multiple-choice, true-false, matching, etc.). Canvas quizzes allow you to create feedback for correct and incorrect responses that will be displayed automatically for students upon submission. You are also able to provide feedback per answer item. While this does take quite a bit of work to set up on the front end, quizzes are easily copied between courses. How do I set up Canvas Quizzes?

How to Implement Feedback

After gathering feedback, it’s important to know when and how to use it. Depending on the issue, you may need to act immediately or plan changes for the next semester.

  1. Gauging Useful Feedback: Keep an open mind and discern which feedback is relevant. Even if feedback seems unrelated to course content, consider if it points to a deeper issue.
  2. Tracking Feedback: Create a table or graph to track recurring comments and identify patterns. Develop solutions iteratively, revising your approach over multiple classes or semesters. If a revision doesn’t work, try another method or consider redesigning the assignment.