Why Is Providing Feedback To Students Important?

Feedback: helps students to engage appropriately

Giving instant feedback is important for effective learning

“We all need people who give us feedback. That’s how we improve.”- Bill Gates. Giving effective feedback helps students learn and achieve their goals. Teachers who provide constructive and instructive feedback often help students reach their academic goals. Here we will see about Why Is Providing Feedback To Students Important?

Teachers should not expect students to passively take feedback. Teachers should provide clear advice and engage in dialogue with students to help them integrate action into their future work.

Why Is Providing Feedback To Students Important?

What do you mean by feedback?

Feedback is a response to a student’s performance or behavior. Feedback can be verbal, written, or even gestural.

The purpose of feedback in the assessment and learning process is to help students improve their results. It is not intended to make students feel uncomfortable or discourage them.

Why is providing feedback to students important?

It is widely accepted that providing positive and constructive feedback to students is one of the most important aspects of effective teaching and learning.

Feedback can help students know where they need to improve and how to do so, as well as motivating them to continue working hard to improve. It is an integral part of learning assessment.

The feedback can help students to participate in meta-cognitive strategies such as goal setting, task planning, monitoring, and analysis, which are important skills for self-learning.

The feedback students receive can have a positive impact on their affective processes, such as effort, motivation, and engagement.

What kind of feedback do students need to improve their learning?

When feedback focuses on the particular quality of the student’s work, it improves learning and provides specific guidance to students on what they can do to improve it.

Feedback should be student-friendly, transparent, manageable, timely, continuous, and accurate. It also needs to be clear, purposeful, and in line with the students existing knowledge and it should not cause a threat to the self-esteem of students.

Teachers should take into consideration certain things while providing feedback. Following guidelines should be followed while providing feedback-

  • Look at the things that students are good at and the things that they need to work on. Then help the student learn and understand what they need to do to improve.
  • For feedback to be effective, it must be tailored to the needs of the students, with the level of support they need.
  • Feedback should be directed towards increasing self-efficacy and better self-regulation.
  • Feedback should not make students feel inferior or it must not threaten their self-esteem.
  • Feedback must guide about ongoing learning.

What are the characteristics of effective feedback?

Following are the characteristics of effective feedback-

Educative in Nature:

Providing feedback means giving feedback that explains what the student is doing correctly and incorrectly while putting the focus on what the student is doing right.

Learning is most effective when the teacher explains to students about the accuracy and inaccuracy of their work.

Feedback should be given on time:

Giving feedback to students immediately helps them remember the information more positively.

If the teacher waits too long for feedback, the student cannot combine the feedback with the learning.

Sensitive to the Individual Needs of the Student:

Teachers should consider each student’s needs when giving feedback.

Some students need more encouragement to reach their potential and others need to be handled with care to protect their self-esteem.

Feedback must answer these 4 questions:

Providing answers to the following four questions will help teachers provide quality student feedback.

  1. What are the things that students can do to improve performance?
  2. What is the student not able to do?
  3. How can the student improve their performance?
  4. What are the student’s strengths and areas where they need to improve in comparison to other students?

Actionable:

Feedback should be very specific so that students can immediately know how to act. When commenting on student work, teachers should be clear about their successes and limitations and should direct students to the work they need to do next.

Three stages of feedback

Feed up- Unless students understand the purpose of feedback, it cannot be effectively given. Feed-up can help them clarify their goals and clarify where they are going.

Feedback- The feedback itself focuses on monitoring and evaluating learning progress concerning the purpose or task of learning. Feedback must answer questions like how I’m doing. What progress is being made towards achieving the objectives?

Feed-Forward- This is related to the further steps needed to improve specific challenges or learning intentions. It’s about what is to be done next? What actions need to be taken to achieve greater progress?  It helps in the refinement of goals and seeking more challenging goals, to achieve success. 

Ways to give effective feedback

  1. Creating a feedback culture that enhances student motivation can be beneficial. Students can increase their efforts if they have clear learning goals. The feedback, which focuses on efforts rather than on the student’s ability to succeed, tends to be more successful.
  2. Creating an environment in which students feel welcome to make mistakes and receive feedback helps them improve. Feedback is most effective when students feel comfortable making mistakes and when errors are seen as an opportunity for learning.
  3. Give students control over their learning. When students feel they have some control and autonomy in their learning, they are more likely to seek and use feedback information.
  4. Reduce the number of tasks you assess to give more quality feedback. Spend time on your chosen work and provide thoughtful, structural, and appropriate feedback.

Conclusion

Every student can benefit from feedback in some way, whether it is offered digitally, verbally, or through written annotations on an assignment.

Giving feedback that is helpful and enables students to reflect on their assumptions can help them avoid succumbing to an outcome-oriented approach to learning.

FAQs

How should feedback be given?

Feedback should be student-friendly, goal-oriented and ongoing, consistent, and timely.

How can feedback be defined?

Feedback is an explanation of the student’s work and is individualized to best meet each student’s needs.