Office of School Improvement Differentiated Webinar Series Formative Assessment – Feedback February 28,2012 Dr. Dorothea Shannon, Thomasyne Beverly, Dr. Greg Wheeler 1

The ultimate goal in school improvement is for the people attached to the school to drive its continuous improvement for the sake of their own children and students. Dr. Sam Redding 2

Today’s Agenda 1.Welcome (2 minutes) 2.Team reports – Checking for Understanding Strategies (10 minutes) 3.Research regarding the Feedback (20 minutes) 4.Activity/Discussion for participants related to Descriptive Feedback ( 20 minutes) 5.Reflections/Assignment for the subsequent webinar (8 minutes) 3

Purpose Participants will be able to differentiate between descriptive and summative feedback Participants will be able to identify the four essential elements of descriptive feedback 4

Team Reporting (10 minutes)  What strategies are teachers using on a daily basis to check for student understanding.  What steps are teachers taking when it is obvious that some or all of the students are not “getting it?” 5

Indistar Feedback Indicators  VC01: Teachers use evidence of student learning as feedback to adapt and differentiate instruction to meet the needs of different students.  VC02: Teachers use feedback to respond quickly to students’ learning needs. This includes on the spot changes during a lesson (when it is obvious students are not understanding), as well as anticipating where students might struggle and planning ahead to address those needs. 6

Indistar Feedback Indicators  VC03: Teachers provide students with feedback that clearly communicates where they are going, where they are not (relative to the learning goal or target), and what they can do to close the gap.  VC04: Teachers help students own their learning by giving them second and third tries to correct their mistakes. 7

Indistar Feedback Indicators  VC05: Teachers plan ways to increase and support the student’s role in their learning – metacognition, self-regulation, peer feedback and students as instructional resources for one another. 8

What the research says…  “Feedback is information with which a learner can confirm, add to, overwrite, tune, or restructure information in memory, whether that information is domain knowledge, meta-cognitive knowledge, beliefs about self and tasks, or cognitive tactics and strategies” (Winnie and Butler, p.5740). 9

What the research says…  “When feedback is combined with a more correctional review, the feedback and instruction become intertwined until the process itself takes on the form of new instruction, rather than informing the student solely about incorrectness” (Kulhavy, 1977,p.212). 10

What the research says…  “Students receive very little quality feedback during a school day. In fact, the average student receives only seconds per day of descriptive feedback, i.e. feedback that identifies what they are doing well, what they need to improve on, and how to go about improving it.” (Hattie and Jaeger, 1998) 11

Providing Feedback  Feedback should be “corrective” in nature. You need to explain to the students what they are doing that is correct and what they are doing that is incorrect.  The research has found that simply telling students that their answer on a test is right or wrong has a negative effect on achievement. Providing students with the correct answer has a moderate effect on achievement. The best feedback appears to involve an explanation as to what is accurate and what is inaccurate in terms of student responses. In addition, having students continue to work on a task until they succeed appears to enhance achievement. 12

Providing Feedback  Feedback should be timely. The timing of feedback is critical to its effectiveness.  Feedback given immediately after a test- like situation is best. The longer the delay in feedback the less its impact on achievement.  Feedback should be specific to a criterion. Feedback needs to reference a specific level of skill or knowledge. This lets the student know exactly where they are relative to specific knowledge or skills. 13

Providing Feedback  Students can effectively provide some of their own feedback. Have the students keep track of their own learning as it occurs. (For example, keeping charts of their progress towards a specific goal.)  Once students have a clear understanding of learning goals, they can then understand where they stand in relation to those goals and take some ownership of how to close the distance between the two (Dylan & Wiliam, 1998.) 14

Two Types of Feedback 1.Descriptive – is specific information in the form of written comments or conversations that help the learner understand what he or she needs to do to close the gap between actual and desired performance. The feedback should; (1) comment on student’s strengths relative to the learning task, (2) comment on area(s) for student improvement, and, (3) provide suggestions for improvement. 2.Evaluative – is a summary of how well the learner performed on a particular task. It is often given in the form of letter grades, numbers, check marks, symbols and/or general comment such as “excellent” or “needs help”. (Teach First, 2010) 15

Descriptive Feedback Examples  “You have interpreted the bars on this graph correctly, but you need to make sure the marks on the x and y axes are placed at equal intervals.”  “What you have written is a hypothesis because it is a proposed explanation. You can improve it by writing it as an “if … then …” statement.  “The good stories we have been reading have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I see that your story has a beginning and a middle, just like those good stories do. Now you need to add an ending to your story.” 16

Evaluative or Descriptive? You correctly solved the equation, but the written explanation is missing a lot of information. Try explaining step by step how you solved the problem to your math partner and then go back and expand on your response. Descriptive or evaluative? Why? (Teach First, 2010) 17

Evaluative or Descriptive? Just a couple of small errors kept you from proficiency. If you keep this up you will certainly get to a level 3 by the end of the quarter. Descriptive or evaluative? Why? (Teach First, 2010) 18

Effective Feedback 19 Effective feedback must answer 3 questions for the student: Where am I going? (What are the goals?) How am I going? (What progress is being made toward the goal?) Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?) Hattie, J. & Timperley, H. (2007). The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1),

What was one idea I learned during today’s webinar that I plan to share with teachers at my school? 20

Team Assignments for Webinar Session 6  Be prepared to share various strategies that teachers are using on a daily basis to provide students with descriptive feedback.  Continue working through the Editure formative assessment modules and continue using the instructional conversations. 21

Questions  Next web session March 27, a.m. and 1 p.m. 22