Learning from Failures: Timely and Helpful Feedback with Rubrics

April 18, 2022

Learning from Failure: Timely and Helpful Feedback with Rubrics

Providing timely, concrete, and supportive feedback is a cornerstone of student success. But providing this quality feedback, especially if you teach multiple sections and/or large sections, becomes especially difficult if not outright impossible.

Failure:

When teaching a class of 30 or so students, I would leave audio feedback on discussion board posts and essays. This audio feedback would focus on explaining what strong elements are in the submission, what elements could be improved, what concrete changes the student could make for next time, and why these changes matter. Some students loved this depth of feedback and shared many kind messages with me to express their thanks. However, others would ask if I could make it shorter…because I was leaving eight to ten minute long audio clips. And others would ask if I could get that feedback to them sooner…because it was taking me longer than a week to do all of that work. Over that period of time, I would become inconsistent with what details I knew I wanted to leave for all students.

Some students were benefiting from this approach, but many more were not.

Teaching Tip:

I had to learn to be faster, consistent, and still be helpful. Enter: Rubrics. A rubric is a useful tool that helped me cover these three requirements. By using great detail in my rubrics, I could demonstrate with explanations and examples what I was looking for and thus my students are able to see how I was evaluating their work.

Benefits of rubrics for quality feedback:

1st – Rubrics make my feedback timely
- Rubrics cut down on my time spent thinking through helpful feedback
- Rubrics give me clear targets to hit
2nd – My timely feedback can be more impactful
- clear expectations can be detailed and have examples
3rd – What I share in my feedback is consistent
4th – Rubrics can get my students on the same page as me regarding expectations
5th – learners who can see the expectations before they start, can practice metacognitive skills of self-review

Tech Tip:

Create rubrics in Canvas for all submitted assignments and discussion boards. Watch this short Quick Hits video for a demonstration on how to make quickly make a rubric and use it in Canvas Speedgrader.

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