Niagara College Canada

How can I use formative assessment and formative feedback in my online course?

Getting feedback on your course

Gathering  feedback helps you to assess what is working and what could be improved in your course to better support student learning. There are two primary ways that you can gather feedback from students. Formative assessments can be used to gather information on what aspects of the course are making sense for students and which ones are less clear based on student work. Formative feedback gives you the opportunity to directly ask students for specific feedback on your course.

Directing student learning

A formative assessment activity is used to monitor and guide student learning over a course. It is different from summative assessment, which evaluates student learning at a particular point in time and is usually graded. Formative assessment is “assessment for learning”, while summative assessment is “assessment of learning”. Using a formative assessment can give you a lot of information about what is and is not making sense to students. It also helps students gauge where they are in the course and assists them in making decisions about what to work on and study more carefully.

Formative assessment options

As the instructor you initiate the formative assessment process to get a sense of how students are doing in the course and where you might make changes to better support their learning. Formative assessment usually involves small, ungraded activities that allow students to identify what important ideas stuck with them, how they might apply specific concepts from class, and what points they are still unclear on. If it seems that the majority of students are challenged by a particular topic, perhaps they require additional support to fully understand and apply this content.

Gathering formative feedback on your teaching

Formative feedback on your teaching involves you asking your students for specific information on their experience of either the whole course or specific course elements. You can ask for formative feedback at various points throughout your course and can use it to modify your instruction or course content so that you can support student learning.

Formative feedback options

As the instructor you can initiate the formative feedback process during a class or after. Based on the information you receive, you can act on the feedback immediately and make the necessary adjustments, or identify key changes for the next session. For instance, if you want to see how your students are doing in a synchronous session, you might use the poll feature. Alternatively, you might use a feedback tool at the end of a session, such as the muddiest point, to see where there are gaps in learning and then modify teaching elements the next time. When students see their feedback being used, it has the ability to motivate and make the course more valuable to them. Other examples of formative feedback options can be found in the next section.

The benefits of formative feedback for instructors

Formative assessments and formative feedback can give you a variety of information that you can use to adapt your course to better meet the needs of your learners. Understanding where students are and what they are looking for makes it easier to identify any gaps or challenges and enables you to look for ways to fix them in a way that benefits your students.

The benefits of formative feedback for students

In addition to having a course that better meets their needs, formative assessment can also support students in other ways. Having students complete small assessments helps them to identify what aspects of the course they have developed competency in and where they should focus more attention. Furthermore, when you make changes to the course based on formative assessment and feedback and acknowledge the source of the revisions with your students, you are improving their learning experience and creating a sense of trust by listening and clearly responding to their needs.

How can I collect formative feedback in my online course?

Collecting feedback

When you are deciding how to collect formative feedback from your students, there are three main things that you might consider evaluating:

1. Is the content appropriate for the learning?
2. Am I instructing in the best way possible for my students and the content?
3. Is the student’s performance indicative of factors within or outside the learning environment?

Determine what your end goal is

You may want to understand better where students are in their learning by assessing what students understand and what they do not based on their ability to summarize or talk about certain topics. Alternately, you may want to ask students to reflect on what they feel is and is not effectively supporting their learning in your course, or a specific element of it.

Consider at which point(s) during the course you want to collect feedback

To get a good sense of how the course is going for your students, you will want to schedule the timing of your feedback collection carefully . Checking in with your students early on in the term, typically during the second or third week of instruction, is an effective way to take the pulse of their learning experience thus far and will allow you ample time to make changes if necessary. Another common time to collect feedback is at the mid-term point of your course. Mid-term feedback collection can still allow you time to make necessary changes, but can also produce more feedback from your students who have had a longer time to process their learning experiences in your course. Helping your students to anticipate when you will be collecting formative feedback will assist them in taking the time to reflect thoughtfully in advance of the provision of feedback.

Consider the characteristics of your class and students

When you select your feedback method it is important to consider factors, such as:

• How much time will the feedback take to set up and to complete?
• How many students will be completing the assessment or writing feedback?
• What kind of direction will students need to complete an assessment or feedback?
• What questions are going to get you the information that you need?
• What tools can you use to gather feedback effectively online?

Using Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs)

CATs are activities that students complete during or at the end of a class or segment of learning. They are usually not graded and fairly simple, and may or may not be anonymous. The purpose of many CATs is to get a sense of what students do and do not understand. Some CATs are designed to ask students to reflect on and provide feedback directly on their course experience. You can use CATs weekly in your class or spread them out more intermittently to assess where student learning could be improved.

CATs for formative assessment

There are a lot of different CATs that work well as formative assessments and that you can use with your students. CATs that work well online include:

• Minute Paper: At the end of a lesson, you can ask students to respond to specific questions such as “What was the most important thing you learned from reviewing this week’s content?” and “What questions do you still have after watching this video?”
• Muddiest Point: This involves asking students to quickly note what was most confusing from the session or most unclear.
• 3-2-1: For this technique, students write out the three most important things they took from a lesson, activity, or resource, two applications of what they learned, and one thing that still isn’t clear to them.

Gathering formative assessments

Blackboard offers a number of tools that can help to facilitate collecting and reviewing formative assessments. For instance, you could have students:

• Submit a written CAT through the assignment tool
• Write their thoughts in a journal entry
• Complete the questions as a no-stakes test with limited restrictions on time or availability
• Answer the questions anonymously using a survey

CATs for formative feedback

Some CATs are designed to ask students to reflect on and speak directly to their course experience. A few options that can work well to prompt students to think deeply about your course include:

• Stop, Start, Continue: Students indicate things about the class that they would like you to stop doing, start doing, and continue doing to benefit their learning experience in the course.
• Mad, Sad, Glad: This technique allows students to identify things that make them frustrated, unhappy, or happy in the course.
• The 4 Ls: In this approach, you ask students what they liked, learned, lacked, and longed for as learners.

Selecting and structuring formative feedback questions

The quality of the questions that you ask is directly related to the quality of the information that you receive from students. So it is critical to consider your goals for gathering feedback and select questions that align with those goals. Some frequently asked open-ended formative feedback questions include:

• What learning activities and/or materials are the most helpful for your learning in this course? Why?
• What learning activities and/or materials are the least helpful and why?
• What specific things could I change to help you with your learning in this course?
• Where are you encountering challenges in this course?
• Are you having any difficulties accessing the course materials/activities? If so, can you provide some examples?
• At what moment were you most engaged as a learner?
• At what moment were you most distanced as a learner?
• What surprised you most about the class?

For a longer list consult this University of Toronto resource of possible formative feedback questions.

Gathering metacognitive feedback from students

Metacognition is the ability for students to reflect and analyze their own process of learning. Sometimes it can be very helpful to gather feedback from students about how their personal preparation and study efforts correspond with their performance in the course. This can be accomplished at the assignment- or assessment-level with an exam wrapper or a cognitive wrapper, which are question sets students complete after submitting an assignment or exam to reflect on their preparation.

For more information on exam and assignment wrapper questions see: A Metacognitive Approach to Midsemester Feedback.

Helping students to provide meaningful feedback responses

Giving good feedback is a skill that requires practice. Students may benefit from some guidance about what good feedback looks like prior to completing a mid-course evaluation. By helping students feel confident that their answers will be constructive, you may also help alleviate some of the anxiety that they may feel in completing an evaluation while the course is still in progress. Here are some ways to encourage meaningful responses:

• Provide students with models of helpful responses.
• Offer students opportunities to provide positive as well as negative feedback.
• Encourage students to provide examples to illustrate their comments.
• Ask students to focus on teaching behaviours or other tangible elements of the course rather than inferred motivations.
• Encourage students to explain how the elements they are discussing have affected their performance in the course.
• Ask students to propose alternatives to what they identify as problematic elements of the course.

Setting conditions for receiving high-quality feedback

In order to motivate students to engage in your course feedback activity and take the time to provide you with specific and meaningful insights, you might consider:

• Giving students a heads-up about the evaluation. Two to three days ahead of collecting any formative feedback, tell students that you will be collecting their feedback on how the class is going. Ask them to consider what is going well for them as learners, and what they would like to see change.
• Highlighting for students how evaluations will be used. You may wish to walk them through your process for creating the evaluation, and explain why you chose the questions that you did. Outline how you will review and interpret the evaluations. This will help to convince students that their feedback will be heard, to encourage them to take the evaluation seriously, and to provide substantial and thoughtful comments. Studies demonstrate that the more students know about the evaluation process, the better the comments they provide.
• Explaining to students what outcomes they can anticipate. Note that you may make some changes to the course as a result of the evaluations, and what students should expect of that process. If you have made changes to courses from evaluations in the past, you may wish to provide some examples.
• Clarifying with students how their anonymity will be protected. Students may be anxious about providing mid-course feedback because, unlike end-of-course evaluations, their comments will be read by the instructor before final grades are submitted. Do not connect evaluations and the grading process (for example, do not administer evaluations as part of a midterm test or provide marks for completion of mid-course feedback).
• Providing students with enough time to both plan their responses and complete their evaluations.

How can I use and respond to formative feedback in my online course?

Using formative assessments

Using assessments to check students’ knowledge of course content can give you a lot of information regarding what is making sense for students and what is still confusing. Consider both the things that are making sense and those that are not. For instance, are your students understanding or having trouble with the same things, or are they different? If they are the same, are there any commonalities that you can identify? If they are different, are there any ways that you can incorporate some tools or strategies that will help students to manage their own learning? Can you use the evidence you gather to identify trends in terms of which students are struggling in what areas and then develop a strategy that gives them what they need rather than re-teaching everyone?

Responding to formative assessments

If you are using assessments to inform your teaching going forward, it can be helpful to highlight for students what is working, what has been challenging, and what you are doing to address it.  This approach can increase students’ feelings of being supported  and demonstrates that you arre interested in their learning.

Analyzing and using formative feedback

Feedback received directly on a course can sometimes be challenging to read.  A few strategies that can make the process effective and easier include:

• Looking for trends in terms of strengths and areas of concern. Group the responses into positive and negative piles. Identify trends and themes in each category. This worksheet from the University of Toronto may serve as a useful tool to help you organize your feedback.
• Identifying concerns that show up across a number of different students and prioritizing course changes that might address those issues.
• Sometimes it can be beneficial to invite a trusted colleague or friend to read the feedback and summarize it for you. They can serve as an arm’s length, objective reviewer who may be able to identify new patterns or interpret student responses in novel ways.

Responding to formative feedback

Once you have gone over your feedback, it is important to express your gratitude for the students’ input and communicate your findings and any resulting course changes to them in a timely manner.  Acknowledging that you will be making changes to your course based on their input serves as a clear indication that you are listening to their needs.  Where possible, be as specific as possible about the changes that you intend to implement.  You can also address any changes that students may have requested but simply aren’t feasible and provide an associated explanation.