Feedback is More Than Comments on an Assignment
As educators, a lot of our time and thought goes into giving students feedback. Papers are commented on, assignments are marked up, rubrics are completed, and areas for improvement are carefully explained. But after all that work, an important question remains: did the student actually learn anything from the feedback? Good feedback should leave students with a clearer understanding of their own learning than they had before.
Feedback helps close the space between where a student is and where they are trying to go. Sometimes that means clarifying a misunderstanding. Other times, it simply helps a student see their own work differently and recognize what needs more attention. Over time, these moments can help students become more aware of their own strengths, habits, and areas for growth.
The timing of feedback can make a big difference in whether that learning happens. Detailed comments on a final paper may be informative, but students have little opportunity to apply them if the course ends a few days later. Feedback provided while learning is still underway becomes something students can work with. A student might use a comment on an early draft to rethink their approach, then see the difference that change makes in the final version.
Of course, not every assignment needs to be revised or resubmitted. The larger point is that feedback should have somewhere to go. Even feedback on completed work can shape a later assignment when students are encouraged to carry what they learned forward. And none of this requires feedback to take the form of extensive written comments. In fact, depending on the learning goal and the moment in the course, another approach may be more useful.
Feedback Can Take Many Forms
Feedback is often associated with comments written on an assignment, but that is only one way students can receive information about their learning. The format that works best can depend on what students are working on, the kind of guidance they need, and how quickly they need it.
Written feedback is perhaps the most familiar. Comments on an assignment or annotations within a document allow instructors to respond directly to a student's work. Rubrics can serve a similar purpose by showing students how their performance relates to established criteria. Written feedback also gives students something they can return to later.
Audio or video feedback can be particularly helpful when an idea is difficult to explain in a short written comment. An instructor might record a brief response to an assignment or use a screencast to talk through a student's work. Hearing the instructor explain their thinking can also bring some of the conversational quality of face-to-face feedback into an online course.
Not all feedback needs to be individual. Whole-class feedback can address patterns that emerge across a set of assignments. A short announcement or video after grading, for example, can clarify a concept that caused widespread confusion without requiring the same explanation to be repeated in every student's submission.
Feedback can also come from sources other than the instructor. Peer feedback gives students a chance to respond to one another's work, while also requiring them to think carefully about the criteria they are using to evaluate it.
Self-assessment shifts some of that responsibility to students themselves. Working with a rubric, exemplar, or checklist can help students notice aspects of their own work that they might otherwise overlook.
Even automated feedback can play a meaningful role, especially during practice. A Canvas quiz that explains an incorrect response gives students more to work with than a simple red X. Used this way, automated feedback becomes another opportunity for learning rather than simply a way of reporting whether an answer was right or wrong.
The goal is to choose a form that makes sense for what students are learning and what you want them to take away from the experience.
Ultimately, useful feedback does not have to mean more feedback. A page filled with comments can easily become overwhelming, while a few focused observations may give a student a much clearer sense of what to work on next. What matters is that feedback connects to what students are learning, gives them something meaningful to take away, and, when possible, gives them an opportunity to put that learning into practice. When feedback is designed with that purpose in mind, it becomes more than a response to completed work. It becomes part of the learning itself.