Page 33 - Teacher's Guide: My Own SBA Toolkit for CSEC English Examinations

Unhelpful feedback practices: What to avoid
Students’ perceptions have characterised unhelpful feedback as being:
1 so late that it provides no opportunities to apply the feedback to further summative assessment within the same module;
2 having a potentially negative impact on students’ egos; 3 having limited transferability across modules;
4. deficient in specific advice to improve;
5 not adequately focused;
6. difficult to interpret; and 7 untrustworthy
Try to structure your feedback practices in a manner such that you are helpful rather than unhelpful
Source: Campbell, 2013
Helpful feedback: Some tips
Here are a few tips that will help to raise the standard of your feedback practices:
1 provide feedback early enough so that it provides opportunities to apply the feedback to the final portfolio product;
2 put a positive spin on things so that your feedback may have a potentially positive impact on students’ egos;
3 write feedback in a manner that it may be applied to other writing tasks within the SBA and in other subjects as well;
4. content rules; context also—ensure that the advice provides enough specific details which may be used to guide improvements;
5 ensure that feedback is adequately focused, for example, if the student scored poorly on one aspect of a rubric, provide cohesive feedback that may be used as a roadmap for improvement
6. keep it simple, flag up positives, underscore the areas for improvement, use very precise and clear language; for example, “the rubric calls for you to identify and define the task; you have only identified the two tasks, ensure that you write statements to say exactly what happens during the execution of these tasks”; and
7 ensure that the comments and the scores match up; it is hard to resolve receiving 1 out of 4 when the comments are sparse and provides nothing to act on
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Section 4: Assessing Like a Pro