It used to be commonplace for teachers to give written feedback to students on the paper assignments that they turned in. However, as districts moved to digital grade books and student information systems, much of this feedback faded away. While much of this feedback is given to students in other forms, there are common practices among feedback practices. Feedback to students is a critical part of the learning process, as it closes the information processing loop, and it allows students to learn from the mistakes and problems that they make during learning the learning process. Solid and effective feedback must have three major components for it to be useful and effective for students: specific, articulable, and actionable. These three components make feedback given to students on daily assignments and assessments useful to allow them to take corrective action in the learning process.

What is Specific in Feedback?

When we are talking about specific feedback, this means that the feedback given to a student is specific enough that it gives the student a path to a solution or method to fix the problem without explicitly stating how the problem is fixed. This can be a marker or circling the problem in the document to give location and context with a question-based prompt. The method does several things at the same time, first it allows the student to know when the problem is in the project, document, or assignment. It also begins to build context for the solution by showing what is going on around the problem point. Finally, using a questioning method you as the teacher are not directly giving the student an answer but giving them a direction or path to a solution. This intern allows students to use the process of fixing a problem as a learning opportunity to additionally build knowledge and skills in their learning process.

What is Articulable for Feedback?

Articulable feedback is being able to state what the problem is in a clear and concise manner so that the student can easily find out what is problematic with the work that they have already done. I typically try to give a statement about the problem with a question or two that leads to the solution or fix for the problem without giving a direct answer. Articulating the problem, context and a path to the solution can be difficult at times, especially if you are grading under some type of time constraint. One tactic that I started to employ when creating this method was starting to catalog the various pieces of feedback that I was giving to students around assignments or topics. Since 80% of the feedback, I was giving centered around similar problems on assignments, I was able to speed up my grading process and give students better feedback. I often found myself trying to write different wording combinations until settled on a combination I liked and could reuse.

What is Actionable Feedback?

One of the problems that I see with teacher/student feedback quite often is that the feedback either gives the student a direct path to the answer or it does not give the student the information that they need in order to take corrective action on the problem. If you are taking nothing else away from this article, it is that feedback must be actionable in some way. If feedback is not actionable, then it becomes a waste of the teacher’s time and effort and it will become meaningless to students. As we talk about actionable feedback, this means that the student gets a clear picture of some type of correctable action that they can take to improve the assignment or fix a specific problem. I prefer a two-part feedback system, the first part of the feedback is a statement that helps to describe and identify the problem, while the second part is a question or guiding statement towards the solution. This method allows me to easily create feedback, but also to mix and match the statements and questions to as needed from my lists to build other pieces of feedback for students. This systematic approach creates a very sustainable system of feedback that students get used to and builds into the culture of the classroom.

Building a feedback system for your assignments and assessments is a process that many teachers learned in educational classes during university programs, however many of these methods have fallen by the wayside and are taught very much in educational classrooms. However, they give students valuable opportunities to build upon previous mistakes and problems which re-enforce and build knowledge in deep and meaningful ways. In the age of digital learning, student feedback is a methodology that needs to be brought back in a consistent, meaningful, and sustainable method that benefits teachers and students.