Feedback that Fits
This week we were to read and respond to Susan M. Brookhart’s Feedback That Fits article that is available here at: http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec07/vol65/num04/Feedback-That-Fits.aspx. The article seemed to echo a lot of the ideas that I have about what constitutes effective feedback.
I am a firm believer that feedback serves two roles: to let the students know what they did wrong and to motivate students to do better. Brookhart agrees in the article stating that there are both “cognitive and motivational factors” to giving successful feedback. Many students retreat from learning something that is difficult because they are afraid of getting the answer wrong. We need to make sure that students are comfortable answering any question that may come up in the classroom. We need to have the reward of a right answer completely outweigh the fear of getting an answer wrong. I think that feedback can go a long way to creating this type of atmosphere in the classroom.
Students need to be congratulated on not only correctness of thought, but also on originality and creativity. This will encourage students to share their thought patterns and how they dissect information as it comes to them. By giving feedback that this type of meta cognition is as praise worthy as the giving of a correct answer should go a long way to create a classroom culture that is both warm and information rich.
Resources I Have Access to for Providing Feedback
We were given a couple of feedback tools this week to take a look at and evaluate.
For the first evaluation I chose Rubistar (available at http://rubistar.4teachers.org/) . This online rubric creation website I have used in the past with mixed results. I find that the first time I am implementing a project my rubric is never quite as ironed out as much as I’d like. I invariably assign too many points to trivial matters and then not enough on content. Typically I rework the rubric for the next year and try again. My reworked rubrics are usually too narrow and do not provide me with the flexibility I want in grading work to go up against its peers. I’ll eventually get into a pattern that will allow me to utilize rubrics effectively and that is where Rubistar really shines. It has a very slick interface that helps you design your own rubrics that can build off of what other teachers at the site have used. This helps eliminate some of the first year jitters that I described. Also, once you have a quality rubric you can share it with other teachers around the world. This seems to be a quality tool for rubric creation.
For the second evaluation I chose Quia (available at http://www.quia.com/). This website is actually a portal to several different websites each with their own set of tools for the educator to provide quality feedback. Quia books is an online textbook repository that contains multimedia and game aspects built into the text. I spent some time playing with an inorganic textbook that had a flash card simulator and an online word search component. The cost for the book was a modest $12.95 and it was comparable to other texts I have used on the subject matter. Quia web has a ton of java based games for students to use when studying topics. Most of the games (hangman, flashcards, matching, ect.) are built upon terms and definitions. Again it is a paid site, but it does not seem to have the over all level of polish that the Quia Books section has. Fortunately I does allow you to create your own games and quizzes. This looks great, but at a cost of $49/person it seems to be a little steep for what is essentially a quiz creation / vocab practice website. You can get html coding websites like http://classtools.net/ and http://www.internetraining.com/Templates/CKQuiz/index.html that will allow you to build these html games and quizzes into your existing teacher webpage without having to fork over the extra cash to create these interactive items. The last item in the Quia web service was the IXL math website for PreK-8 students. It has a series of web based math applets that change the numbers every time you use them. I did not spend much time here because I use a similar product at school.
For the last two years my school has given me access to Blackboard to use with my students as a way of increasing interactivity in the classroom and during homework assignments. I have used the website extensively to create calculated formula homework problems that change every time the attempts the problem. I have seen a lot of gains in my AP Physics students’ mathematical reasoning skills since the students have instant feedback on whether a problem is right or wrong one they input an answer. This coding and question making took an exceedingly long period of time and now they are shutting down the website on me (^%$! Budget cuts), but it gave my students some great tools to use while it lasted.
Compare and Contrast Available Student Response Technology Tools
In addition to Blackboard and the quiz making websites above I have access to 12 Senteos in my district. Senteos are little student response clickers that can receive numerical, true/false and multiple choice responses from students when they are paired with a SMART board and a host of other add on equipment. They are clunky and tend to wig out in my basement classroom, but they are great for getting prolonged feedback from students about a lecture or other activity. I prefer to use http://www.polleverywhere.com/ when I can get away with not following our school’s cell phone policy since it has less setup time and more of a fun buy in for the students to use.
We also have access to email for extended feedback and we are piloting a paperless grading system that involves submitting pdfs to a special networked drive that has write only permissions in it for the students. So far the paperless grading has been a hit with students liking the amount of feedback that I can type onto a lab report (versus hand writing) as well as the speed that electronic grading provides me. This means that the students get back their labs quicker and while the information is still fresh in their minds. The pilot program is still going strong and should have all the bugs worked out of it in the next few months. Then all of the teachers will have better access to grade student work electronically.
Reflection on Setting Objectives
Chapter 1 in Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works is all about setting objectives so that you have a clear goal in mind when you craft your lessons. The text outlines how to get started using Rubistar and goes into a little about how to implement standards based objectives. Honestly this chapter could be a book on its own. The objectives of a unit or an assignment are almost as important as the learning activity itself. Clear objectives help craft and hone what you are trying to get students to learn so that a teacher’s classroom time is less about “baby-sitting” and more learning. Objectives are always hard to nail down, but we should try our best to create these before we begin teaching so that we have direction and purpose to our daily lessons.
Reflection on Providing Feedback
Chapter 2 in Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works deals with successful strategies to provide students with feedback for their work. It outlines how to use comment tools in Word as well as classroom response systems and a host of other technologies to better communicate with students what is correct and what needs to be corrected in their work. I find that some types of technology help foster good feedback, while others actively work against it. For example I really like the instant feedback that my Blackboard website gives to my students when they take multiple choice quizzes, do calculated problems and submit homework assignments. The instant feed back that they get frequently promotes a dialogue between students about how to solve the problems they got wrong. Waiting a week to get back your test or assignment and the students’ though processes are not as fresh in their minds. As a result they are much less interested in the correct answers because we have moved on with the content. Like wise the decreased grading time that students have to wait for due to my electronic commenting on students’ lab reports helps them grow as scientists much faster than slower, more traditional methods.
Unfortunately it has not been all positive with using technology to promote feedback in my classroom. Some students took to removing the comments that I had placed in Word and resubmitted their lab reports. They then insisted that I had incorrectly graded their papers and asked me for a re-grade. I did and found that their errors had been corrected. Had I not had the original lab reports saved the students could have tricked me into getting more points on their assignments. Even worse than this is the issue of plagiarism and cheating that can go on in electronic assignments. The ease of “copy / paste” frequently lulls my students into a sense that the easy path of cheating is better than actually learning from the process of the assignment.
Reflection on Providing Recognition
Chapter 3 in Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works contains information about providing recognition to students. The text shows ways of creating online certificates and creating multimedia files that praise a student’s work. I have a couple of ways that I praise my students when they do exceptionally well in my classroom. On tests and quizzes I use dollar store stickers when the test is 100%. My high school seniors go crazy for them as they always want to show off to one another. Another thing I do other than the stickers is to give a hand shake each student who has improved when passing out papers or tests. It is more personal than the 100% stickers and recognizes that physics is not an easy thing to get an A in. Lastly I like to email parents about turn arounds in work completion or test scores for a student. The email seems to be a good way to go as I have quite a few students who come in with a print out of my email that their parent gave them. The praise means more to the student when it comes from their parent than just a “good job” from me.
Wow. My jaw dropped when I read your posting. I would love to have the resources that your district seems to have provided you. I have a Moodle page that I can use for communication and some feedback, but my students on the whole do not have the computer resources necessary (in or out of school) to be able to fully use this online class resource. The funny thing is that I am one of the more advanced technology using teachers in the school, even compared to another teacher who has completed this MEIT from Stritch, and I feel so handicapped by the resources that are available to my students.
ReplyDeleteI like your point about feedback being both used to improved the academic achievement as well as the student's motivation. I just remember my first year in MPS when my Assistant Principal who told me that the way I needed to get my students to want to achieve was to buy the high scoring students things like CD's, DVD's, radio's, etc. I was flabberghasted. For me trying to do well in school has never been about being able to get stuff. When my parents attempted to reward me for good grades in high school, nothing happened, and I was just a mediocre student who had lots of "potential". But when I found success and realized it was fun for me to learn, my attitude changed and I have performed pretty well since then.
As a Greendale resident I am glad to hear that some of my property taxes are being used to support technology programs at the high school. I am a little distressed that your Blackboard access is falling victim to budget cuts - I'm sure I could find other areas in the budget to cut before that.
ReplyDeleteI am particularly intrigued with your use of PollEverywhere and paperless grading systems. Both could work particularly well in my virtual school since we have no restrictions of student cell phone use and exchanging paper is a difficult proposition for us.
As far as plagiarism goes, we use a tool in Blackboard called SafeAssign which produces a report that shows the exact location where the information was lifted from another Internet resource. There is another tool out there called TurnItIn that you might want to check out.