This is going to be a super short post, directed to you SBGers. One of the things we talked a lot about this summer at PCMI was feedback! [1]

Here’s my question about feedback and SBG.

Let’s say you give a skill test with 3 or 4 skills on it, and you want to give feedback. Let’s also say that you give a numerical score for each skill. Besides that score, what sort of other feedback do you give on the test? 

I’m wondering how explicit you get with identifying the issue, and what the goal(s) of you feedback is/are. Do you…

…circle where the student first started going awry?
… write a sentence (or two! or three! or more!) using words to explain where the work went awry?
… focus on something other than where the error crept in?
… give the total solution, written out for ’em?
… give some broad thoughts, encouragement?
… do something else?

 
Basically, I am super curious what your feedback looks like — in addition to the numerical score. The reason I ask is this… we talked a lot about feedback, but we didn’t talk about what effective feedback looks like. And for me, I don’t tend to give too much feedback. I’ll do some circling, some encouragement, I might write a sentence or two if the error is easily identifiable, but then I expect the student to figure the rest out on their own, or by working with a colleague.

And at first, as we talked more and more about feedback at PCMI, I felt a little guilty for the paucity of my feedback. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought: I think what I do is actually good for them. I don’t want to do all the work for them — they have to be a little more proactive. But I also wonder what and how others do, to see if there are things to steal to improve!

I wish I had scans of actual assessments to show you and have you give suggestions about how you’d mark them up, but in lieu of that, I’d like to hear how you do it (or would do it).

[1] One thing that struck me was how feedback given with a grade tends to be ignored by students, but feedback given without a grade tends to be really considered.