Four big problems about feedback from education research
by Sarah Hanusch, March 24, 2025
Full article linked here. Excerpts below.
Feedback is one of the cornerstones of alternative grading systems, as we want our students to learn from feedback and apply it to other assignments, assessments or revisions. However, not all feedback is created equally, and the research my collaborators and I have conducted has shown that many students struggle to understand the feedback that we give them. In particular, we have discovered four big problems with the feedback we leave on students’ papers: (1) students don’t use it, (2) students don’t understand it, (3) students can’t apply it, and (4) we may not give it equitably.
Two quick disclaimers on the research findings that I will discuss in this blog post. These studies concerned feedback on student-produced mathematical proofs, and much of the data came from clinical interviews that were not connected to a specific course. Although this specific research focused exclusively on student proofs, many of the findings could apply to other areas of mathematics and other subject matters.
… When we provide students with written feedback, here are some of the best practices:
- Give the students time to review their feedback during class.
- Give the students an incentive to learn from the feedback through revision or reattempts.
- Tell the students why their work is correct or incorrect, not only what.
- Even when the work is good, tell the students what components of the work you evaluated. Rubrics can help with this.
- Students need more explicit information about how the feedback applies to similar tasks in their future.
- Students need explicit directions on what they should do with the feedback to learn.
- We need to be aware of our biases and the potential for our feedback to be swayed by those biases.
I know that giving explanations and more detailed feedback can increase the amount of time that we spend. I have not fully solved that problem. But some alternate techniques may help, such as using technology or recording feedback videos. Gradescope allows you to save feedback and copy it to other student work. When grading digitally, I often create a Word document with the feedback that I give, because it’s easier to copy and paste from that document instead of from within my LMS. Some faculty members feel that giving feedback via video is faster for them instead of writing feedback, particularly some of my colleagues who teach English writing. Alternatively, you could make one video for the whole class where you can give a mini lecture about why the errors you saw are errors. Similarly, providing oral feedback by talking with the students when you hand back the papers to address common mistakes (and why they are mistakes) is a valuable tool. Oral feedback to the whole class is also a useful way to convey what students should do with the feedback.