I was sitting at my laptop marking up some labs and realized I had some students that kept making the same mistake as previous labs. So…this got me thinking. How can I get students to more carefully utilize my feedback? (This isn't a post to bash my students that aren't using my feedback. It's as much an indictment of how I structure feedback as it is of their lack of using the comments.) I will describe for you a technique I have used previously - with some success - which I have re-adopted.
But let's go back in time a bit, to last fall. At that time I wrote a post about how I use Drawboard PDF on my Surface Pro 3 to provide written feedback to students on their lab reports. I still utilize Drawboard, but wanted to try using a slightly different means of providing feedback. So I revised a lab report Comment Bank I created a few years ago to make it more relevant to the new IB criteria for Internal Assessment. And while some of the comments might be quite specific to IB, the idea itself - and some of the comments included - might prove useful.
So now when I provide feedback on a student lab, I write comments that refer to an online Comment Bank that students can view. See the image below. In the image, there are three specific comments, Eval.4, Eval.23 and Eval.24. The specifics of these can be found in the online Comment Bank. I use a Google Form, because I can add a comment any time. I tend not to change the numbering system, even though I keep thinking I'd like to re-order them to be a bit more logical. But what happens is I think of a new comment and simply add it to the end of the list. If a student has a previous lab with a specific comment, I don't want to mess them up with a new numbering system.
Comment Bank
Does it work? I find that this allows me to give more detail in less time. And the feedback actually includes some guidelines/advice for the students about how to fix the errors - which is something my students have requested previously. So when a student receives their lab report back, they go to the online Comment Bank for the details.
I've attached the same lab below that I shared (with student permission) in the fall with regular feedback. This time many of the comments could be made by referring to the Comment Bank.
My goal in using this method is two-fold. First, I'd like to be more efficient with my comments - and this allows me to streamline that process. Admittedly the first few labs in any marking cycle are a bit slower as I reacquaint myself with the Comment Bank. But once I get in a groove and start remembering the specific comment codes, the process becomes faster. My second goal - which I haven't implemented yet - is to have students keep track of the comments. So after a few lab reports, if a student is getting the same comments, I'd want them to recognize that and actually work to improve the next lab with respect to that specific comment - getting better with each lab report. I'm hoping to implement that next year and see how it goes. I'll provide an update if/when I make that happen.
