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Critical Role of Formative Feedback

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Developing Self-Regulating Learners

The Critical Role of Feedback

Cheryl Rose Tobey and Lynn Goldsmith

All teachers wish for their students to become engaged, successful, and enthusiastic learners, and teachers often make observations such as this: I want students to take responsibility for their own learning. I want my students to be active learners.

Teachers and researchers alike recognize that students who can monitor and regulate their own learning are more effective learners (Butler & Winne, 1995). Yet teachers may not know how to help their students learn to take charge of their own learning process.

Formative assessment is an instructional approach that seeks to develop the kind of ownership and self-regulation that promotes the development of successful learning (Heritage, 2010; Wiliam, 2011). Classrooms that engage in formative assessment practices are ones in which teachers are explicit about expectations for learning and both teachers and students monitor students' work in terms of progress toward those expectations.

The shared practice of reflecting on students' understanding in the context of clearly identified goals helps students learn to monitor their progress, receive feedback intended to promote further learning, and incorporate the feedback into subsequent work.

Three Central Questions for Regulating Learning

Teachers can help students learn to receive and incorporate feedback, and therefore monitor and adjust their learning, by helping them address the following three questions (Sadler, 1989; Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Wiliam & Thompson, 2007):

1. What are the goals for my learning?

2. Where am I right now in relation to my goals?

3. If I haven't yet met my goals, what do I still need to do?

The first question sets the stage for students' self-monitoring by helping them understand and articulate the criteria against which their work should be gauged. The second and third questions support students in the monitoring process itself.

Here are some suggestions for how teachers can help students address these three critical questions, with examples from teachers who have participated in the Formative Assessment in the Mathematics Classroom: Engaging Teachers and Students (FACETS) project, a professional development and research project for middle school mathematics teachers.

Question 1: What Goals Am I Aiming for in My Learning?

In FACETS, we refer to the overarching learning focus as learning intentions (LI) and the criteria for achieving the learning success criteria (SC). Learning intentions articulate the important mathematical concepts that drive the lesson. Success criteria articulate the evidence teachers and students will use to assess whether students' work reflects achievement of the learning intentions. Self-regulating learners use success criteria as the standards against which to evaluate their own work.

It's not enough, however, for a teacher to simply state the success criteria at the beginning of a lesson and move on. At a minimum, teachers will want to check in with students about their interpretations of the criteria. Sharing and clarifying learning intentions and success criteria can quickly become a comfortable part of daily lesson routines. Consider, for example, the way coteachers Tracy and Tom introduce a lesson to their 6th grade class.

Tracey and Tom draw attention to the LI and SC they've posted on the whiteboard:

LI: Through modeling, I will understand that dividing a whole number by a fraction means finding how many of the fractional parts are "in" the number.

SC 1: I can model the division of whole numbers by fractions.

SC 2: I can explain how modeling problems can help me determine how many fractional parts are in the number.

Tracey gives everyone in the class a minute to silently read the LI, and then reads the two criteria aloud. She asks if anyone has questions about them. Although no one asks for clarification, she asks for volunteers to provide examples of models in mathematics, to be sure that students understand the terminology.
Recommendation 1: Use an established routine to share learning intentions and success criteria with students. Sharing and clarifying the success criteria at the start of a lesson offers students an initial view of how they should be gauging their work for the day. Nonetheless, it is important to build in opportunities to revisit the success criteria throughout the lesson to continue to build students' understanding of what it looks like to meet the criteria. For example, Tracey and Tom typically return to their success criteria during class discussions.
After they review the LI and SC about division by fractions, students work individually on the problem: "How many people can we feed if we have 7 sandwiches and we give everyone half a sandwich?" Tracey and Tom move around the class to see how students approach the problem.

When they pull the class together for discussion, Tom asks Vanessa to share her solution with the class because he feels that her work is helpful in moving toward meeting the SC. As Vanessa explains her solution, Tom points to each of the criteria, highlighting how her work relates to them.
Recommendation 2: During the lesson, build a shared understanding of what meeting the success criteria looks and sounds like. When teachers help students develop an understanding of the learning intention for the lesson and the criteria for judging achievement of that intention, they are providing students with the foundation for monitoring their own learning.
Question 2: Where Am I Currently in Relation to Those Goals?

One way to help students learn to self-assess is by assessing the work of peers; students may find it easier to be objective about work that's not their own.

Tracey continues the class discussion of the sandwiches problem by sharing a solution that used a different model than Vanessa's. Tracey then presents a third solution, since she wants the students to also consider work that does not meet the SC. This solution is based on a mistake she noticed on several students' whiteboards.

The class discusses whether the diagram accurately models the situation (it does), how the model relates to the corresponding number sentence (they are not equivalent), and how the work relates back to the SC.
Recommendation 3: Set the expectation that students will assess their own (and their peers') understanding relative to the stated success criteria and provide adequate class time for their assessments. As students learn to gauge their work and the work of their peers in terms of success criteria, the responsibility for interpreting the evidence no longer falls solely on the teacher.
Question 3: If I Have Not Yet Met the Goals, What Do I Do Next?

Formative feedback helps students troubleshoot their own performances and take specific action to improve the quality of the work. Dylan Wiliam notes that formative feedback "should cause thinking. It should be focused; it should relate to the learning goals that have been shared with students; and it should be more work for the recipient than the donor" (2011, p. 132).

Nancy developed a feedback handout to help students focus on where they had met success criteria and where they still had work to do. She attached the handout to students' work:

You met Success Criterion #______ when you did _______ because______.

You haven't yet met Success Criterion #_____ because ________. Consider trying ______________.

She also created a whimsical feedback "sandwich" template that serves as both a tool and a shared point of reference for reminding students to reflect on the three big questions.

In the beginning of the year, while her students are getting used to identifying and responding to learning intentions and success criteria, Nancy provides most of the feedback herself. As the year progresses, she asks students to provide the "bread" and the "filling" for the sandwich for one another's work, as well as for their own, work.

Students' initial efforts at giving feedback to peers may not be of the best quality. For many, providing substantive feedback is a new experience, and students need time and guidance to learn how to do so. Teachers' own comments can provide students with models for formative feedback, and teachers can also explicitly teach feedback skills by analyzing examples of feedback with students and together brainstorming ways to improve them.
Recommendation 4: Provide opportunities for students to both give and receive feedback. Peer feedback serves two important purposes: 1. increasing the learning resources in a classroom by having students, not just the teacher, provide formative feedback; and 2. helping students learn to apply processes of analyzing work with respect to their own self-assessment.
Acting on Formative Feedback

The purpose of formative feedback is to provide guidance for students' continued learning. It is therefore crucial that students work to understand and act on feedback instead of simply receiving it and setting it aside. Again, the teacher plays an important role in helping students learn how to engage with feedback productively.

During one of their lessons on data and probability, Sharon's 6th grade students create bar graphs. After the lesson, Sharon collects the papers and reviews them that evening. She starts math class the next day with this observation: "I noticed several common issues in your work that relate to our success criteria for the lesson. We'll talk about these for a few minutes before I return your work."

On the overhead projector, she lists the lesson's SC and records the issues, illustrating them with examples from students' papers. Sharon repeats the process for each SC, filling in the table in Figure 1 below on the overhead projector.
Figure 1. LI: I will understand how a bar graph is constructed to represent a data set.
Sharon then returns the papers, instructing the students to "use the table we just made to determine what you did correctly and what issues you may need to consider while revising your work to meet each of the SCs." As students review their work, she checks in with certain students about how and why they plan on revising their graphs.
Recommendation 5: Provide opportunities for students to use formative feedback. Teachers can help students by modeling and having students practice strategies for responding, such as revising an explanation or problem, asking for clarification about feedback, and asking for additional feedback on revised work. As teachers introduce new strategies, they can post them on a Strategy Wall to serve as a reference for the repertoire of strategies that students can draw on when considering their next steps.
Teachers can make headway in promoting their students' purposive learning by helping them consider the three central questions we highlight in this article. These are questions that, with appropriate scaffolding, even the youngest students can practice asking and answering. In providing this scaffolding, teachers help students develop the focus and discipline needed to monitor and adjust their work-to become self-regulating learners.

References and Resources

Brookhart, S., Long, C., & Moss, B. (2008). Formative assessment that empowers. Educational Leadership, 66(3), 52-57.

Butler, D. L., & Winne, P. H. (1995). Feedback and self-regulated learning: A theoretical synthesis. Review of Educational Research, 65(3), 245-81.

Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1), 81-112.

Heritage, M. (2010). Formative assessment: Making it happen in the classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Sadler, D. R. (1989). Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems. Instructional Science, 18, 119-144.

Wiliam, D. (2011). Embedded formative assessment. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree.

Wiliam, D., & Thompson, M. (2007). Integrating assessment with instruction: What will it take to make it work? In C. A. Dwyer (Ed.), The future of assessment: Shaping teaching and learning (pp. 53-82). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Cheryl Rose Tobey is a senior mathematics associate at the Education Development Center (EDC). She is the project director for Formative Assessment in the Mathematics Classroom: Engaging Teachers and Students and mathematics specialist for Differentiated Professional Development: Building Mathematics Knowledge for Teaching Struggling Students; both studies are funded by NSF. She is also mathematics specialist for the IES-funded Eliciting Mathematical Misconceptions study. Lynn Goldsmith, a principal research scientist at EDC, has studied professional development for mathematics teachers, investigated principals' instructional leadership for mathematics, examined the role that emotions play in learning, and explored possible relationships between arts education and mathematical reasoning.

ASCD Express, Vol. 8, No. 11. Copyright 2013 by ASCD. All rights reserved. Visit www.ascd.org/ascdexpress.

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ASCD Express 8.11 - Developing Self-Regulating Learners: The Critical Role of Feedback

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Developing Self-Regulating Learners The Critical Role of Feedback Cheryl Rose Tobey and Lynn Goldsmith All teachers wish for their students to become engaged, successful, and enthusiastic learners, and teachers often make observations such as this: I want students to take responsibility for their own learning. I want my students to be active learners.

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Misconceptions

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author: Brian Weishar, Sue Bryen, and Jenni Donohoo

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Determining the Root Cause of Misunderstandings in Mathematics - Corwin Connect

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In today's classrooms, teachers are called upon to gather and use evidence of student thinking in a timely, formative way to implement and differentiate instruction that improves learning for all students. An important part of that process is "to identify and address potential learning gaps ...

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Learning Goals

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Teacher clarity is one of the high yield practices for building assessment-capable learners (Frey, Hattie, Fisher 2018). Included in teacher clarity is communicating learning intentions and success criteria, which is also a focus of one of NCTM's eight effective mathematics teaching practices: Establish mathematics goals to focus learning (NCTM, 2014).

Although the importance of establishing and using learning goals is widely accepted, teachers across the nation share with me the need to improve their implementation of this practice. The following three guidelines are designed to support implementation:

1) Create lesson level learning goals with a balanced set of success criteria

A Learning Intention can be defined as the core mathematical concept students will understand by the end of the lesson. Success criteria are statements that allow the students and teachers to know what they will use as evidence for meeting the learning intention. Together, the learning intention and success criteria are often referred to as the learning goal or target.

Success criteria should include a balance of procedural and higher-level process skills that would provide evidence that a student is on track to meeting the learning intention.

Sample sentence starters for developing

procedural success criteria include:

I can identify . . .

I can solve . . .

I can distinguish between ___ and ___

I can define . . .

I can use ____ to . . .

Sample sentence starters for developing higher-level process success criteria include:

I can use a model to . . .

I can explain why . . .

I can design a . . .

I can construct an argument about . . .

I can provide evidence for . . .

Teachers indicate their learning goals too often focus only on procedural skills. As you develop and refine a learning intention and success criteria, the following questions can guide your process for creating a balanced learning goal.

Is the learning intention focused on the important mathematics concepts in the lesson rather than referring to activities or tasks students will complete?

Does at least one of the success criteria describe something students can do or explain how to do (procedural success criteria)?

Does at least one of the success criteria describe something students can justify, model or explain at a higher conceptual level? (higher-level process success criteria)?

Samples of Learning Goals with a balanced set of success criteria.
2) Establish and use routines to focus students' attention on the criteria while learning is underway.

Since success criteria are what both the teacher and students will use to determine the extent to which students are meeting the goal, pausing at key points mid-lesson provides a much-needed opportunity for students to summarize their learning to that point.

Routines can provide structure and purpose to revisiting the goal. Below is a list of examples of such routines:

Take Stock is used after the completion of a task or activity. Engage students in a discussion using the following series of questions.

1) "Who can describe for me what we've done so far with (this math

task)?"

2) "So in our success criteria, we said we would (read criteria to students). Can someone else describe what this means in their own

words?"

3) "In what way did this task help us work toward meeting the success

criteria?"

A Picture Tells a Thousand Words is used to highlight the difference between doing and learning. Post a picture of students engaged in a task with manipulative or other materials. Ask:

1) What were we doing?

2) What were we learning?

Feedback Focused Group Discourse is a way for teachers to provide whole-group feedback or feedback on selected student responses.

Create a feedback poster or anchor chart displayed in a place visible

to students with the following sentence prompts:

You are on track for meeting the learning goal because _________.

You haven't yet met the learning goal because _________.

A hint to revise your thinking is _________.

Showcase a student worked example and have students respond to the prompts in partners or small groups. Lead a whole group discussion to debrief. Close the feedback loop by having students revisit their own work.

3) Take appropriate responsive action based on evidence collected.

At any time in a lesson when you elicit and interpret evidence, there are a number of possible responsive actions, whether for an individual or for the whole class. The four most common are:

a. Provide formative feedback. When students show enough understanding or skill that some slight adjustments will allow them to meet the current goal, then provide formative feedback. One method for doing this might be to use the Feedback-Focused Group Discourse routine described above.

b. Provide further instruction. If the evidence suggests that there is a significant gap between a student's current learning status and the learning goal, the student is unlikely to make progress after receiving formative feedback. This may be because there is a significant barrier or misconception or because there are enough smaller issues that they collectively prevent students from moving on. In such a case, taking a step back to address the issues through further instruction is often an appropriate responsive action.

c. Gather more evidence. In many cases, when a student gives you a response, the information gathered may be inconclusive. You might have gained some insight into student thinking but not enough for you to determine which of the other responsive actions is most appropriate. In this case, you simply need to gather more evidence.

d. Move on. Most often, this is appropriate when your students are on track with where you expected them to be, with regard to meeting the goal. This may be after a task has been completed and you check in to see where students are with a particular success criterion; even if they haven't met the criterion completely, they might be far enough along that they are ready to continue to the next task in your lesson plan. This also may be at the end of a lesson, when you review the evidence of the entire lesson against the whole set of success criteria.

Following these guidelines can greatly improve student learning. Creating a balanced set of criteria focusing on important higher-level processes supports conceptual understanding of the core mathematics idea. Revisiting of the learning goal helps solidify its meaning for students, and can serve different purposes in moving students' learning forward. Asking "to what extent are my students meeting the learning target", helps determine an appropriate responsive action and differentiation needs.

References

Creighton, S.J., Rose Tobey, C., Karnowski, E., Fagan, E. (2015). Bringing Students into the Formative Assessment Equation: Tools and Resources for Math in the Middle Grades. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Frey, N., Hattie, J., Fisher, D., (2018). Developing Assessment- Capable Visible Learners, K-12. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Hattie, J., Fisher, D., Frey, N. (2017). Visible Learning for Mathematics, Grades K-12. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.

Keeley, P. and Rose Tobey, C. (2011). Mathematics Formative Assessment Volume 1: 75 Practical Strategies for Linking Assessment, Instruction, and Learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Keeley, P. and Rose Tobey, C. (2016). Mathematics Formative Assessment Volume 2: 50 Practical Strategies for Linking Assessment, Instruction, and Learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. 2014. Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.

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author: Brian Weishar, Sue Bryen, and Jenni Donohoo

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3 Guidelines for Mathematics Learning Goals - Corwin Connect

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Teacher clarity is one of the high yield practices for building assessment-capable learners (Frey, Hattie, Fisher 2018). Included in teacher clarity is communicating learning intentions and success criteria, which is also a focus of one of NCTM's eight effective mathematics teaching practices: Establish mathematics goals ...

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OK State MSP Funded

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MA17 M 11832_Reveal Math Formative Assessment Probes.15

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Research Project IES Funded

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Targeting Instruction with Formative Assessment Probes - National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

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Education Development Center (EDC) advances lasting solutions to the most pressing educational, health, and workforce challenges across the globe. Our work is guided by evidence, empathy, and experience.
Learn about EDC

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Education Development Center (EDC) advances lasting solutions to the most pressing educational, health, and workforce challenges across the globe. Our work is guided by evidence, empathy, and experience. Learn about EDC