How Effective is Your Feedback? Is It Helping or Hurting?
Dear Feedback, Itâs You, Not Me
How good is the feedback you share with your students? Is it truly helpful or just what you think you should be doing?
Actually, itâs estimated that one-third of feedback interventions decrease performance and drastically plummet student motivation (Kluger and DeNisi 1996).
One-third.
Letâs talk about what this really means.
This means that when you take home a pile of papers and spend hours providing meticulous comments to help students, one-third of those hours were NOT helping students, so they were wasted time that could have been spent with loved ones or engaging in hobbies.
Ever feel that you leave comment after comment, highlighting areas for growth, only to see those same issues in the next paper, test or presentation? And the next? And the next?
Why are we surprised when â time after time â our feedback is disregarded and unused?
Instructional coach, former educator and author Tyler Rablin has been there, done that, and created a new t-shirt.
In Hacking Student Motivation: 5 Assessment Strategies That Boost Learning Progression & Build Student Confidence, Tyler shares 3 valuable insights and 1 amazing tool to make the most of your time and truly help your students improve.
1. Trash the Compliment Sandwich
Are you familiar with the âcompliment sandwichâ? Itâs a technique where you provide a positive piece of feedback, then some criticism, and then another positive piece of feedback. While there are books, PD and articles in all fields written on the subject, some people just inherently learn to practice it. These sandwiches, however, are not as great as they sound.
First, it downplays the value of constructive criticism. By buffering the criticism with something positive, we are communicating that criticism is negative and must be balanced by something positive. And do we really want to teach our students that constructive criticism is a negative?
Second, it builds negative associations with positive feedback. If every time you give me a piece of positive feedback, you immediately follow it up with criticism, then Iâm going to fear positive feedback as an omen of bad feedback on the way. Along with this, it results in feelings of mistrust and inauthenticity between the deliverer and receiver.
As the receiver of a compliment sandwich, did you ever feel that second bit of positive feedback ended up being a bit of a stretch? The second positive part of the sandwich might as well have been something like, âGood font choice in Times New Roman. Very classy.â Itâs often devoid of substance, and students are good at picking up on inauthenticity.
Third, the compliment sandwich is primarily used to benefit the deliverer, not the receiver. Nobody likes being the bearer of what could be considered bad news. As such, we bolster the bad news with bits of praise so we can walk away feeling like the good guy when weâve really added potentially harmful or irrelevant bits of information that make it less likely students will remember what they need to work on (Von Bergen, Bressler, and Campbell 2014).
2. Rock The Power of Three
Most of us are giving way too much feedback. After all, if we donât mark every incorrect comma in a paper or misspelled word in a presentation, how will our students know what to fix for next time?
However, a great deal of research supports leaving less feedback.
In fact, one report asserts that the optimal amount of feedback to provide to students is the equivalent of three comments on an essay (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick 2007).
Three.
Thatâs it.
This is because our brains are efficient, and part of this efficiency means we have to quickly make decisions about which information is relevant and which is not. When we receive a wave of new information, our brains can essentially shut down (called cognitive overload).
When we hit this state of cognitive overload, our amygdala kicks in as a reactive measure. This is why, when you see students receive lots of feedback, not even necessarily negative feedback, they seem to shut down. They may get quiet or defensive. They may deflect or distract from it. They are trying to avoid dealing with it because itâs just too much to handle at once. Itâs frustrating to see them just check the paper and move along quickly, but what we must be mindful of is that this might be their amygdala taking over with a fight, flight, or freeze reaction.
We donât have enough room in our working memory to process all that information at once. As great as our brains are, they are fickle. Overloading them with too much information is a surefire way to prevent learning and to kill motivation.
When this study mentions that we need only three comments per piece of writing, the authors add one more crucial piece of information. The full statement says, â... three wellâthoughtâout feedback comments per essay was the optimum if the expectation was that students would act on these commentsâ (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick 2007).
That part of the statement, âif the expectation was that students would act on these comments,â is the key. We can give students all the feedback we want, but if we surpass the three comments, we canât expect them to act on all of it, or any of it.
Give them three goals to work on, then move forward.
3. Keep it Relevant
One more requirement of effective feedback is that it must be relevant to future content.
Have you ever returned feedback to students so late that itâs no longer relevant to what they will work on in future classwork? No judging. Many of us have.
Keep in mind: giving feedback without providing an opportunity to use that feedback to improve is nothing more than pointing out a flaw. If students donât have the opportunity to use the feedback, then donât leave it.
Our brains are good at getting rid of useless information, and if I receive feedback that I canât use immediately or in the near future, my brain will decide pretty quickly that itâs not relevant information. If we want students to utilize feedback, we must make sure they have a relevant application for it and an opportunity to grow and improve as a result.
4. Power Up a Portfolio
Imagine for a second that youâre a crime scene investigator. When you arrive at a crime scene, another investigator tells you theyâve already jotted down lots of notes for you to read and try to find patterns and meaning. When you ask to see the notes, they point to the ground, which is littered with sticky notes spread out all over with individual observations written on each one.
How quickly do you think youâd be able to make meaning out of all that?
It may seem like a ridiculous scenario, but we do the same thing with students and feedback throughout the term. We commonly leave isolated comments on individual assignments that a student has to dig through to find, and then we wonder why they didnât use them.
This is when Tyler Rablin decided to use feedback portfolios. Instead of scattering information all over the place for his students, which eventually was lost, he created a simple chart where students could easily access previous feedback, discover trends and patterns, and track their progress.
Hereâs his feedback portfolio:
Thatâs it. Thatâs all it is.
There are so many iterations of this, including a cool slide deck portfolio where students display their work with feedback next to it, and a flap on student folders where teachers put feedback portfolios, so the students see them every time they open the folder. How they look doesnât matter as much as the fact that they exist.
Build a feedback portfolio that works for you and your students in your context and content area. Not every feedback portfolio needs to look the same. In some portfolios, each piece of essential learning for the unit has its own spot for students to record feedback. This has the added benefit of having students categorize their feedback, forcing them to think more about their goals as they engage in this process.
Note: you may want to provide a physical feedback portfolio as opposed to a digital one, especially if you donât have daily access to technology. The goal is for students to see them regularly, so access is the key.
Think about what this opens in terms of opportunities for learning:
First, simply the act of transcribing, summarizing, or categorizing the feedback means students interact with it more than just acknowledging some comments on a paper and moving on. This act of rewriting the feedback helps signal to their brain that this is information worth holding onto.
Second, writing it down somewhere also has an added benefit. If a studentâs memory decides to get rid of this information, itâs not buried in an obscure assignment they will never look at again. Weâve taken those isolated bits of information and put them where the student can easily access them.
Third, keep in mind that feedback doesnât just mean written comments from the teacher. Missing a question on a math test is feedback. Building a tower that falls apart is feedback. When these activities happen, the feedback portfolio can be a vehicle for students to pause and reflect on what they need to learn next.
And that, my friends, is the true goal of feedback: students can explain what they need to learn next.
The Final Word
Whatâs most important is what effective feedback and these portfolios allow students to notice. When the bits of feedback are spread out all over, students canât see any trends or patterns. As a result, they canât see growth. With a template like the one above, students often see skills move from their âgrowsâ column, which identifies areas they need to work on, into their âglowsâ column, which is where they are celebrating their success.
This can be huge for some students. It reinforces the idea that they struggled with a concept but, through effort and learning, they grew in that area and can now celebrate growth.
Linking growth to efforts and actions is one of the most powerful activities we can take to support kids in developing their academic confidence and, for this to happen, we must first create an environment where they can see that growth and celebrate their wins.
Take a Deeper Dive into Feedback with
Hacking Student Motivation.
Read More
- Chamberlin, Adam, and Svetoslav Matejic. 2018. Quit Point: Understanding Apathy, Engagement, and Motivation in the Classroom. Times 10 Publications.
- âHelping Students with Anxiety: 4 Key Strategies.â X10 Publications blog post. November 8, 2024.
- Rablin, Tyler. 2020. âHow to Make Sure Grades Are Meaningful and Useful to Students.â Edutopia. November 25, 2020.
- âRecognize That Everyone Quits, and Itâs Not Always a Problem.â X10 Publications blog post. November 12, 2020.
- Bressler, Martin, Clarence Woodrow Von Bergen and Kitty Campbell. âThe Sandwich Feedback Method: Not Very Tasty.â January 2014. ResearchGate.
- Greene, Nicole. âFeedback Fridays.â Edutopia. George Lucas Educational Foundation. January 17, 2025.
- Kluger, Avraham and Angelo DeNisi. âThe Effects of Feedback Interventions on Performance: A Historical Review, a Meta-Analysis, and a Preliminary Feedback Intervention Theory.â March 1, 1996. Psychological Bulletin. 119. 254-284. 10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254.
Check Out Tyler Rablin's Stuff!
This is a great website! While there are still some pages under construction, you can find feedback templates, rubrics and an abundance of other resources you can use right now ⌠and theyâre all free to download and use!
*NOTE: While the Resources page features a huge crane image and says âUnder Construction,â scroll under the image to find the Feedback Portfolio templates and lots more. Also check out the IETA and Auburn tabs in the menu. Then, visit soon for even more updates. Youâll be glad you did!
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Resources
- Part of this text is taken from Hacking Student Motivation: 5 Assessment Strategies That Boost Learning Progression and Build Student Confidence.
- Sanchez, Ray. âHow Teachers Are Preparing Themselves and Their Students for Immigration Sweeps.â CNN. February 7, 2025.
- Chalkboard image by Adrian from Pixabay.
- Main post feedback image by Adrian from Pixabay.
- Sandwich image by Christine Sponchia from Pixabay.
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