How to Offer Strategic Feedback/Introduction
Effective Feedback
The most helpful feedback for writers (students) offers observations on what the student has done in the assignment and explains how the student’s choices affected their reader(s). Asking questions and offering advice for creating the desired effect(s) will help the student improve their written communication, while helping to avoid an emotional reaction.
The most effective writing feedback isn’t evaluative – it doesn’t focus on whether the work was “good” or “bad”, or let the student know whether you liked or didn’t like their work. These types of comments can cause students to become defensive or react emotionally in other ways, which is more likely to prevent them from processing comments productively. Negative comments can even shatter self-esteem and belief1. In all cases, feedback should provide little threat to a student at the self level2.
For example (less effective):
“I liked the first paragraph, but your definition of behavioural ecology wasn’t as good as it could have been. You can make it better by providing more detail.”
Compared to (more effective):
“In your first paragraph, you offered the context that a layperson/casual reader would need in order to understand behavioural ecology. The actual definition of the concept you offered reads like a dictionary definition and doesn’t explain the jargon used. If your intended audience is the layperson, this could be confusing to them and could make them assume that they need some specialist knowledge to understand the rest of the paper. How have you seen other popular science writers address this in their work? Which strategies can you employ?”
Specific Direction
When choosing what to comment on, think about the goals you have for your students and for their writing. Do you primarily want them to be able to demonstrate their understanding of material, or to communicate clearly? Focusing your feedback on the main goal will unify your comments, while keeping students on track to deliver according to your expectations in future assignments. Students also prefer feedback to be specific and timely, and to be especially supportive at an early stage of their learning experience3.
Whether or not you use a rubric to guide your feedback, focusing on helping students to achieve one clear goal per assignment will help them improve their writing in a meaningful, achievable way.
Teaching Students About Feedback
Research shows that students often fail to understand the feedback points that instructors and tutors raise4, which is why engaging in dialogue after providing feedback is important. Students should not see feedback as being a one-way conversation, and engaging in dialogue can help them see the value in it5. With this in mind, it is important to fully explain the purpose, benefit and meaning of written feedback6 (e.g. outline that feedback is intended to help students develop their skills by providing ideas that will help them do so). Many instructors even devote some class time to teaching students how they want them to view the feedback process, and how they want them to respond7.