The final two criteria in Section C underscores the importance of formative feedback and self-assessment.

Many students excel when given opportunities to learn from their mistakes. For instance, discussion forums offer students an opportunity to compare their performance to their peers, but the students may need explicit instructions to do so.

C7: Feedback
C8: Self-Assessment

Feedback is, arguably, the whole point of any assessment. Without feedback from you—the subject matter expert—students are pretty much left to figure out on their own how they’re doing. And that’s a recipe for confusion!

This rubric criterion is not about whether you give feedback. (We're confident you do.) Because students often don't know what to expect in terms of feedback from you, this element is focused on making sure there is an explanation for students of when, where and how they will receive feedback. Those new to Canvas may not know how to access the feedback in their Gradebook so it's good to include a resource (Canvas Guides are perfect!) for that.

Frequent, low-level assessments that offer opportunities for either self-assessment or formative feedback help students gauge their learning and adjust their studying to support their goals. Many instructors might have opportunities for feedback built into their course, but they may have two important omissions. First, the feedback is not timely, so students have moved on to the next project (or figured out their errors in other ways). Second, the instructor does not explain what students should do with the feedback. Aligned courses provide a clear plan that is articulated to the student that explains when the instructor is providing feedback. Exemplary courses add to this plan by explaining how to access feedback in the course, and exemplary courses explain how students should use feedback to guide improvements.

In essence, we should also be paying attention to the myriad opportunities (discussions, activities, and assignments, for instance) throughout a course that provides immediate or timely feedback to students, and we should be looking for places where instructors explain their plan to students. Can you think of other places we can look for this type of feedback or planning in a course?

Finally, students learn more when they are asked to reflect on their performance and make plans for improvement. This is especially helpful when they receive feedback on their self-assessment. Instructors can use strategic opportunities for self-assessment to boost students' meta-cognition, and they can provide expert feedback to help students improve. Additionally, exemplary courses routinely provide this level of self-assessment and provide encouragement or suggestions to help students improve.

Self-assessment options might include reflection after a major assignment, clearest/muddiest point reflections, and/or practice quizzes. You can also slip a self-assessment question or two into existing quizzes/assignments.

It's the feedback-from-you aspect that is crucial here. The purpose is to help students see where to focus their attention on learning, particularly if they're off-track in some way. Keep in mind, students don't always know when they're off-track so simply asking them to get in touch if they have questions wouldn't achieve alignment for this element.

If offering knowledge checks or practice quizzes, you can use SpeedGrader to provide some kind of targeted feedback for incorrect responses. Just indicating right/wrong isn't sufficient. The reason? Studies have shown that merely indicating whether the answer was right or wrong had little effect on retention. But when corrective feedback was provided for an incorrect answer, a roughly five-fold increase in the chance of successful recall occurred. That’s pretty significant!

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The CVC-OEI Course Design Resources by CVC-OEI is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Development of this course was funded by a grant from the California Community Colleges' Chancellor's Office.