Activity 4. Application of strategies for efficient feedback

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Consider your own feedback practices and how they will influence the student's learning process. These practices suggest strategies that make for more efficient use of your time and energy on feedback for students. Is there a way you can adopt or adapt the kinds of strategies below into your feedback practice?

Strategies for efficient feedback (adapted from Curtin University)

  • Focus your time and effort on feedback that is likely to have the most impact. For example, provide extensive feedback on a draft/preliminary assessment due early in the semester, and reduce the feedback provided on the final product due at the end of the semester.
  • Summarise key strengths and common areas for improvement for an assessment and provide this verbally (in class), or in a brief audio-recording or text document in the Learning Management System.
  • Use group feedback from one study period as feedforward for students in the following study period (assuming the assessment task is comparable, but not identical to the previous task).
  • Use rubrics to reduce the need for extensive written comments as well as providing feedforward to students about assessment expectations/standards (especially if you use the rubrics with students for clarification prior to working on the assessment). Most Learning Management Systems have a set of interactive rubrics that can be helpful for this purpose.
  • Create and maintain electronic 'banks' of feedback comments related to different aspects of assessment tasks which can be shared amongst markers and reused from year to year.
  • Experiment with voice recording (e.g. using Audacity) to provide very personalised feedback to students in an audio file that you can upload to the course within the Learning Management System or email to them.
  • Be selective about what you provide feedback on – feedback that is transferable to other tasks is most likely to be used by students. Invest time in feedback that supports deep learning rather than feedback on surface features of work (e.g. spelling).
  • Use automated feedback where possible, such as building feedback into electronic tests and quizzes that provide students with the correct response and rationale.