Feedback codes: Giving Student Feedback While Maintaining Sanity

We heard our guest writer, Stephanie Chasteen (Associate Director, Science Education Initiative, University of Colorado at Boulder), talk about feedback codes in the CIRTL MOOC, An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching, now completed, but due to run again in the near future.  She presented in Week 2: Learning Objectives and Assessment, segment 4.7.0 – Feedback Codes. Below is her explanation of this technique.


One of the most important things in learning is timely, targeted feedback.  What exactly does that mean?  It means that in order to learn to do something well, we need someone to tell us…

  • Specifically, what we can do to improve
  • Soon after we’ve completed the task.

Unfortunately, most feedback that students receive is too general to be of much use, and usually occurs a week or two after turning in the assignment – at which point the student is less invested in the outcome and doesn’t remember their difficulties as well.  The main reason is that we, as instructors, just don’t have the time to give students feedback that is specific to their learning difficulties – especially in large classes.

So, consider ways to give that feedback that don’t put such a burden on you.  One such method is using feedback codes.

The main idea behind feedback codes is to determine common student errors and assign each of those errors a code. When grading papers, you (or the grader) needs only to write down the letter of the feedback code, and the student can refer to the list of what these codes mean in order to get fairly rich feedback about what they did wrong.

Example

Let me give an example of how this might work.  In a classic physics problem, you might have two carts on a track, which collide and bounce off one another.   The students must calculate the final speed of the cart.

Diagram of classic physics problem of colliding carts on a track.Below is a set of codes for this problem that were developed by Ed Price at California State University at San Marcos.Feedback codes table

How to come up with the codes?

If you already know what types of errors students make, you might come up with feedback codes on your own.  In our classes, we typically have the grader go through the student work, and come up with a first pass of what those feedback codes might look like.  This set of codes can be iterated during the grading process, resulting in a complete set of codes which describe most errors – along with feedback for improvement.

How does the code relate to a score?

Do these feedback codes correspond to the students’ grades?  They might – for example, each code might have a point value.  But, I wouldn’t communicate this to the students!  The point of the feedback codes is to give students information about what they did wrong, so they can improve for the future.  There is research that shows that when qualitative feedback like this is combined with a grade, the score trumps everything; students ignore the writing, and only pay attention to the evaluation.

Using Grademark to provide feedback codes

Mike Reese, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins, uses the feedback codes function in Turnitin.  The Grademark tool in Turnitin allows the instructor to create custom feedback codes for comments commonly shared with students.  Mike provides feedback on the electronic copy of the document through Turnitin by dragging and dropping feedback codes on the paper and writing paper-specific comments as needed. Screen shot showing example of using GradeMark

Advantages of feedback codes

The advantage of using feedback codes are:

  1. Give students feedback, without a lot of extra writing
  2. The instructor gets qualitative feedback on how student work falls into broad categories
  3. The grader uses the overall quality of the response to assign a score, rather than nit-picking the details

Another way to provide opportunities for this feedback is through giving students rubrics for their own success, and asking them to evaluate themselves or their peers – but that’s a topic for another article.

Additional resources:

Stephanie Chasteen
Associate Director, Science Education Initiative
University of Colorado Boulder

Stephanie Chasteen earned a PhD in Condensed Matter Physics from University of California Santa Cruz.  She has been involved in science communication and education since that time, as a freelance science writer, a postdoctoral fellow at the Exploratorium Museum of Science in San Francisco, an instructional designer at the University of Colorado, and the multimedia director of the PhET Interactive Simulations.  She currently works with several projects aimed at supporting instructors in using research-based methods in their teaching.

Image Sources: Macie Hall, Colliding Carts Diagram, adapted from the CIRTL MOOC An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching video 4.7.0; Ed Price, Feedback Codes Table; Amy Brusini, Screen Shot of GradeMark Example.

Using Twitter in Your Course

The Innovative Instructor has written about using Facebook in the classroom, what about Twitter? What’s next? you might ask, Pinterest? Yes, even Pinterest seems to have inspired faculty to find uses for its boards in the classroom. Today, however, I want to make a case for using Twitter.

Twitter Logo Blue BirdWhat is Twitter? Wikipedia tells us that “Twitter is an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called ‘tweets’. Registered users can read and post tweets, but unregistered users can only read them.” From celebrities to revolutionaries, the Twitterverse (aka the Twittersphere) is comprised of more than 500 million users; 271 million of these use Twitter actively. While many complain that the content is mostly inane babble, there are serious, even scholarly, conversations taking place on Twitter every day.

This example of an educational use comes from the CIRTL MOOC, An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching, now completed, but due to run again in the near future.  If you signed up for the MOOC, you may still be able to access the content. The Twitter example was presented in Week Five: Inclusive Teaching and Student Motivation.

Margaret Rubega, Associate Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut with a PhD in ornithology, decided to use Twitter, appropriately enough, for her introductory ornithology course. Rubega describes the course as face-to-face with approximately 100 students each semester it is taught. There is no lab component, so she struggled to find ways to introduce active learning in what has been primarily a lecture format. Another issue is that most of the students have grown up watching nature programs on TV (or YouTube videos), which exposed them to the concept that animals and birds are exotic species that live in remote areas. To her incoming students, nature was something that takes place somewhere else.

Rebega wanted to get her students to appreciate the way that biology plays out in their world. That it is something that they could observe when they walked out of the classroom onto campus. She knew that telling them (in lecture form) did not equal an appreciation that comes from observation and experience. She wondered if she could get students to use their electronic devices in some way that would force them to look up and see what was happening around them.

Thus was born #birdclass. The # sign is called a hashtag and is used to identify a specific conversation within the cacophony of tweets. By using the hashtag, Rubega and her students could have a targeted discussion. You can search Twitter for #birdclass to see the class-related tweets. Rubega assigned her students to tweet once a week. Each tweet was to 1) identify where they were, 2) what bird-related phenomena they saw, and 3) how it connected to course content. If it had the required three components, the tweet was awarded three points. She put a cap on the total number of points she would award each student.

Rubega’s initial goal was to make students take the course content outside of the classroom and see that what was described in class actually occurs in their world. She looked at Twitter as a tool that would allow her and her students to gather their observations in a way that was immediate and easy to access. She was not thinking about the social implications.

As soon as the students started using Twitter (and Rubega was posting to encourage them and provide examples of her expectations), their interest in engaging in conversation with her and their peers became immediately apparent. She began retweeting (forwarding and promoting in Twitter parlance) their best tweets to a larger audience interested in ornithology and thus facilitating a broader conversation outside of the class. This provided feedback from others in the field. The social aspect created instructional value that Rubega had not anticipated.

The second year she taught the course using Twitter, she traveled to Belize during spring break. She had not mentioned this trip to her students. While in Belize she began posting a list of birds she seen and asked if her students could identify where she was. Even though it was spring break and she had no expectation that any of her students would be monitoring their Twitter feeds, several student responded immediately. In a series of tweets, they worked on figuring out her location by looking at bird range and distribution charts. Rubega described being “blown away” by this experience. Further, when she returned to class, she gave the winning (first to correctly guess her location) student a token souvenir as a prize. This young women commented that she had learned more about geography in doing research during this tweet exchange than she had in high school.

Rubega maintains that Twitter works for her students because it allows self-directed, real-life discovery of the world around them. Their observations bring affirmation of what they have heard in class. The reward comes via interaction with their peers and a larger community of ornithologists, as well as acknowledgement of their tweets with the point system. By the end of the course, the students are using their knowledge to teach others in the Twitter ornithology community – by correcting and commenting on others’ identifications and observations, for example.

In thinking about the kind of learning that students achieve in the tweeting assignment, many of their tweets involved application and analysis (Bloom’s Taxonomy). This represents a higher level than might normally be associated with a straight lecture format – typically, transfer of knowledge and comprehension by the students.

You can see Margaret Rubega’s tweets at https://twitter.com/profrubega. Besides teaching at the University of Connecticut, she is also Connecticut’s state ornithologist.

If you are interested in using social network applications, such as Twitter, in your classroom, there are several articles by Derek Bruff, director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching and a senior lecturer in the Vanderbilt Department of Mathematics, that will be informative. In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, A Social Network Can Be a Learning Network (November 6, 2011), Bruff references the concept of “social pedagogies,” a term coined by Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University. “They define these as “design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an ‘authentic audience’ (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course.” Leveraging student interests through social bookmarking, a CIRTL Network blog post from August 22, 2012, describes Bruff’s experiences using social bookmarking in two classes he has taught. And his students’ preferences for social bookmarking tools are discussed in a post, Diigo Versus Pinterest: The Student Perspective (May 31, 2012), on Bruff’s Agile Learning blog.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image Source: Twitter blue logo https://about.twitter.com/press/brand-assets