Building Awareness of Effective Feedback Practices
Nora Gavalyan and Anastasiya Bezborodova, Uzbekistan
Anastasiya Bezborodova is the Module Leader of English for Academic Purposes module at Westminster International University in Tashkent. She has eight years of teaching experience. Her first M.A. is in English Linguistics and another is in TESOL. The areas of her research interests include ESP material design and assessment, written feedback, teacher training and academic writing. E-mail: abezborodova@wiut.uz
Nora Gavalyan is a Lecturer at Westminster International University in Tashkent where she teaches English for Academic Purposes. She has five years of teaching experience. Her M.A. is in English. The areas of her research interests include written feedback and academic writing as well as transnational education. E-mail: ngavalyan@wiut.uz
Menu
Introduction
Background
Study one
Study two
Conclusion
References
Giving formative feedback is a rather novel practice in Uzbekistan, which is gaining popularity as more teachers in higher education engage in researching its benefits for students learning. However, in schools and colleges of Uzbekistan the formative feedback is not yet widely used. This is partly due to overreliance of the school and college education on assessment tasks that make no use of feedback. Throughout the year, students are assessed multiple times through random quizzes, mid-terms and final exams. A typical language activity generally requires memorization of the learnt material and is assessed through multiple-choice questions, true-false statements, gap-fills and translation exercises. Such tasks limit students’ opportunities to learn anything about how their work can be improved. As a result, students learn to perceive the effectiveness of their work only through the prism of their marks and hardly ever need teachers’ advice. Thus, at the point when they enter Westminster International University in Tashkent (WIUT), accredited by University of Westminster in London, their conventional understanding of how learning should take place clashes with the established practices at the university. At the foundation year at WIUT, students take a core module on English for Academic Purposes. Being teachers of this module, one of the objectives we have is to encourage students to see their assessment tasks as work in progress, which need to be drafted and revised multiple times before submission. Such approach allows students to understand that their marks depend heavily on the effort and the time they invest into the task. At this crucial stage, students realize the importance of getting feedback that they have never been exposed to before.
Feedback, which focuses on the oral and written comments on learners’ work, has been central to second language research for many years. Feedback is one of the most heavily researched classroom techniques in language teaching. This body of research is, in part, the result of other researchers’ attempts to determine whether and to what extent feedback used by teachers leads to language acquisition by students (e.g., Doughty and Varela, 1998; Panova and Lyster, 2002). Many researchers have claimed that feedback helps learners to notice second language forms (Mackey and Philp, 1998; Ammar and Spada, 2006; Yoshida, 2010). Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick (2006, cited in Burke and Pieterick, 2010) state that feedback helps to engage students in thinking about their errors. Today there is a growing agreement that language learners are likely to benefit from feedback, but the benefits may vary according to specific factors such as: the type of feedback, learners’ predisposition (attitude and beliefs, cultural background, aptitude, learning style, and language proficiency), instructional settings, and teachers and students’ attitudes and beliefs about feedback.
One of the most common complaints that teachers voice about feedback giving is the fact that students are almost never interested in it or even if the feedback is given, rarely act upon it. Being guided by this thinking, it is easy to fall into the habit of blaming students for their lack of motivation to address the feedback, while overlooking the important issue of feedback being comprehensible, focused, thought-provoking and dialogical. A more pro-active approach would generally require teachers to reflect on their feedback practices, question some of their long-held beliefs and approach the subject with certain sensitivity.
We (the authors of this article) decided to take action and make a positive change in the module we both teach. English for Academic Purposes (EAP) module involves several written assignments through which students learn the fundamentals of academic writing. At WIUT, EAP is a year-long module that covers different genres of academic writing, one of which is argumentative essay. Students write it during semester two. Therefore, by the time they get to write their argumentative essays, most of them are expected to know the value of feedback and to have experience consulting with their teachers regarding their work. Our plan for conducting action research was to enrich our understanding of feedback giving and to engage students in thinking about feedback.
We have chosen a recently published feedback tool (see Table 1 below) developed by Hughes et.al, (2014) as a basis of our action research studies. The feedback profiling tool is a table that allows teachers to classify their comments according to different categories such as critique, advice, comments on progress, and so on. It helps the teacher to identify the characteristics of their own feedback and even measure the frequency of comments pertaining to certain category. Based on such analysis, teachers may have an objective view of their own feedback and be able to enhance the quality of their comments by taking proper action if needed. In this article we will share the summary of our studies. The first study was conducted by Nora Gavalyan and the second one by Anastasiya Bezborodova.
Table 1. Feedback profiling tool categories and examples.
| Category | Explanation | Examples |
| P1 Praise | Praise is thought to be motivating for students , but if used indiscriminately it can appear insincere | “ You demonstrate a good understanding of learning theory”
“Your discussion is consistently reflective and argument unfolds convincingly”
“Your description of existing literature was excellent” |
| P2 Recognising Progress (i.e., ipsative feedback) | Acknowledging progress can be motivating and informs students about their learning. Lack of progress also serves as an early warning that action is needed | “You have responded to previous feedback with a thoughtful essay”
“ This represents a considerable improvement on previous drafts” |
| C Critique | Students need to know how their work falls short of expectations or criteria; however, criticism can be discouraging especially when not accompanied by information on how to improve | |
| C1 | Correction of errors- numerical or verbal mistakes, referencing errors, spelling, etc. | Correction of errors (C1) may be actual corrections of spelling or grammar written or typed onto a script, or comments about correct procedures for referencing |
| C2 | Factual critiques (of content) | “It is not quite true that all sampling aims to be representative
“Your opening paragraph says that you are going to examine mechanisms of how poverty impacts on cognition, which cannot be correct since none thus far was able to do so” “Grounded theory is actually a research design” |
| C3 | Critique of approach (structure and argument) | “By putting the research approach before the outline discussion, readers would have been provided with a more focused outline of how these issues are applied to exploring the ‘Accent Method’ school experience and theory need to be interwoven and equal in balance” |
| A Advice | Important when the main purpose of feedback is to help students take future action to improve | |
| A1 | Advice specific to current assignment content | “More could have been written about quantitative analysis”
“Try to bring some of the specific research references to your research context into the main discussion”
“You could add something here about social constructionism” |
| A2 | General points that refer to the current assignment | “ When you talk about different studies you need to be more consistent in providing more details (methods used, participants details)”
“Broader reading around the topic and of studies that employ the approach would have helped create a more nuanced discussion” |
| A3 | General points for future learning and future assignments | “In future, if you talk about previous studies, you need to give more details “
“In your next assignment you should flag up something like this at the beginning” |
| Q Clarification requests or queries | Asking learners to think more deeply about their work and generate actions themselves can be achieved through questioning and dialogue | “Not sure what this means- influence in what ways?”
“ I am not clear what assumptions you refer to”
“Why are you only looking at women in this analysis?” |
| 0 Unclassified statements | Neutral comments, for example, that describe the piece of work but do not make any judgment, are unclassified | |
Hughes, G., Smith, H. and Creese, B. (2014). Not seeing the woods for the tree: developing a feedback analysis tool to explore feed forward in modularized programmes. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, pp. 1-16.
The first action research was a comparative analysis of feedback given by the same teacher in two different academic years. During the first year, the teacher had provided feedback without really consciously monitoring it. However, during the second year, the teacher was already aware of the feedback-profiling tool by Hughes et al., which outlines different types of comments, such as praise, critique, advice and clarification requests. The comparison of the two years was supposed to show whether any changes had occurred with the new tool at hand.
The following questions were at the centre of the study:
- Will the awareness of the existing feedback tool by Hughes et al. result in a wider variety of comments?
- Will this awareness allow the teacher to change feedback-giving routine?
As the first step of the action research, the teacher distributed a questionnaire among 28 students, to study students’ perception of feedback (preferred type of feedback). One of the most significant findings was that the majority of students preferred oral feedback to electronic. However, during the study students were reluctant to use the office hours of the teacher to get the feedback. Thus, the teacher paid special attention to the language of comments as the feedback was mostly electronic. The questionnaire also showed that these students were in favour of teachers correcting all of their mistakes and were willing to receive not only comments criticizing their work, but also comments regarding the progress they had made. The questionnaire gave the teacher sufficient information regarding students’ expectations of feedback which was supposed to become the roadmap for the teacher while writing comments.
Having this information at hand, it was decided that in the next step the teacher would randomly choose 15 student papers from semester two 2015, when the teacher did not engage with the feedback profiling tool, and compare her feedback with another 15 randomly chosen papers from semester two 2016, when the teacher was already aware of the feedback profiling tool. In both years, students had submitted their papers during voluntary weekly submissions. All these papers were checked as part of formative assessment. The task and the materials were the same for both years.
The analysis of the comments provided over two years has shown considerable changes in the way feedback was given. The samples from 2015 have shown that the most frequent comments belonged to the category of “Critique”. It has been dominating in various forms while such categories as “Clarification Requests and Queries” and “Praise” were almost not given. There were also no comments under the section of “Recognizing Students’ Progress”. It is important to note that the researcher did not consciously attempt to write every feedback piece with the feedback profiling tool. The purpose was to identify if the teacher’s awareness of the tool would influence the variety of the comments given. The analysis of the samples from 2016 shows that the number of comments under the section “Critique” decreased significantly. These samples generally had fewer comments than sample from 2015. It seemed that the teacher became more selective in what she chose to point out to students and how she put it. There was a slight change in the “Praise” section; however, not in the second type which involved comments on students’ progress. The comments of praise were more of general nature and did not specify significant improvements made by students. The “Advice” category had grown significantly and there were also more comments in “Clarification Requests and Queries”.
Reflecting on this experience, it might be concluded that the mere awareness of the existing tool might be powerful enough to lead some of the teachers to reconsider their feedback giving and shift their focus to such categories of feedback that would not simply criticize the students’ work, but would offer more guidance. It also seems that the awareness of the feedback-profiling tool made the process of feedback more thoughtful, as the teacher generally spent more time thinking about the phrasing of the comments and chose to give more focused feedback. This partly explains the fewer comments on the essays checked in 2016. However, to address better the lack of the comments on students’ progress it is recommended that the teacher constantly reflects on the process and keeps track of the comments provided.
The second action research focused on two particular categories of feedback, “Ipsative” feedback and “Advice”, again included in feedback tool developed by Hughes et.al (2014). The main functions of the two categories are to outline the necessary steps the student should take to close the existing gap in their knowledge and to empower them by highlighting the progress made. To be more specific, ipsative feedback is a developmental feedback on students’ progress and feedback with advice is aimed at providing students with some helpful tips for improvement (Hughes et.al, 2014). The teacher’s assumption was that these particular categories would engage students in active thinking about the comments and acting upon them. The comments would make feedback more dialogic and purposeful at the same time. Thus, over the action research we as the teachers of the class attempted to engage the students in the process of addressing the comments and thus encourage them to to pay more attention to feedback. The additional motivation for the action research was for the teacher to change her own feedback practice by including ipsative comments.
The research questions were:
- How will focused feedback (i.e., ipsative feedback and advice) be perceived by students?
- Will focused feedback engage students in thinking about the comments and acting upon them?
The action research was conducted with English for Academic Purposes module students in the second semester of academic year 2015-2016. There were 40 students in two classes; however, only half submitted their works for feedback on a weekly basis. Firstly, a questionnaire was run to ask students about the comments and feedback practices they had been exposed to during their first semester. Secondly, the teacher recorded herself while giving oral feedback during one-on-one progress meetings with students and kept track of her own comments. The teacher also asked students to reflect on the feedback received during the office hours. Lastly, students were given a final questionnaire to reflect on their experience with feedback in the second semester. The feedback was mostly given on the quality of ideas, logic, use of evidence, essay structure and language use
The findings of the final questionnaire showed that ipsative feedback and comments with advice were both well-perceived by students and they all positively commented on them. Some of the students even indicated that they kept comments for reference until the final submission. They believed that it mainly helped them to fix logical gaps and phrasing of main points, organize and link ideas, and work on improving grammar. The results have also shown that most students enjoyed reading comments with points for improvement.
Upon further analysis of the questionnaires and their comparison with the weekly reflections, the teacher noticed that there were inconsistencies regarding the most popular point students had considered and addressed. Those comments related to providing correct references and avoiding plagiarism were the ones that had received the most attention during the oral feedback sessions according to the students. Surprisingly though, referencing was not particularly stressed in the final questionnaire regarding teacher’s feedback. This may be the evidence that even though the feedback was believed to be engaging students in thinking about idea development, logic, and evidence use, students mostly picked up a very technical and easy-fix point such as referencing. It was also assumed that even if the improvements in other emphasized areas had occurred, students at this level might not have been ready to notice them fully.
Based on the findings, it can be concluded that the intention of the teacher to emphasize some major issues in writing may not be perceived by students in the same way. Some of students involved in this study indeed started thinking about their own mistakes and possible ways of fixing them, while the majority left their mistakes not addressed. They mostly were interested in a quick-fix help that would not take much of their thinking and were less time-consuming. However, it was assumed that the use of focused feedback comments was not very effective because students were new to it and as explained at the beginning of this article lacked experience with feedback. It might be the case that students’ exposure to feedback was not sufficient to address feedback comments effectively. Students should most likely be involved in working on their mistakes and interpreting teachers’ feedback more frequently to engage with it to the full of their capacity. As for the teacher’s work, her feedback routine changed as she started including more ipsative comments and advice not solely critiquing students’ writing.
Both studies show that some teachers may be giving different types of feedback without even being aware of them and students may perceive the feedback differently. To make feedback-giving effective, teachers need to be aware that their beliefs, preferences and the reasons/objectives of feedback giving may not always match the needs of the learners. Thus teachers need to be willing to modify their practices to better meet the expectations of students. In order to increase students' involvement in learning, teachers need to make an effort to explore both their and students’ beliefs and perceptions regarding feedback and make efforts to deal with potential conflicts between students’ beliefs and instructional practices. However, our experience shows that if students are new to the concept of feedback at university level, much more time will be required to prepare them to learn from feedback and understand its significance. The expected level of engagement with feedback set by teachers may at times be beyond the students’ demand. This requires teachers to be realistic in their expectations and more focused in their feedback. They should also be prepared to provide more information to the students on the significance of feedback in their learning.
Ammar, A. and Spada, N. (2006). One size fits all? Recasts, prompts, and L2 learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28(4), pp. 543–574.
Burke, D. and Pieterick, J. (2010). Giving students effective written feedback. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Doughty, C. and Varela, E. (1998). Communicative focus on form. In: Doughty, C. and Williams, J. (eds.) Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 114- 138.
Hughes, G., Smith, H. and Creese, B. (2014). Not seeing the woods for the tree: developing a feedback analysis tool to explore feed forward in modularized programmes. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, pp. 1-16.
Mackey, A. and Philp, J. (1998). Conversational interaction and second language development: Recasts, responses, and red herrings? The Modern Language Journal, 82, pp. 338-356.
Panova, I. and Lyster, R. (2002). Patterns of corrective feedback and uptake in an adult ESL classroom. TESOL Quarterly, 36, pp. 573-595.
Yoshida, R. (2010). How do teachers and learners perceive corrective feedback in the Japanese classrooms? Modern Language Journal, 94(2), pp. 293-314.
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