How do I provide feedback to students in the LMS?

In the April edition of Learning Environments News, we provided some theory behind why feedback is important and how to provide effective feedback in the post: Providing feedback to students. In this edition, we outline some of the ways you can implement effective feedback in your LMS subject. Several tools provide the opportunity for both staff and students to provide feedback in a variety of activities.

Comments on assignments

Comments and annotations on assignments can be provided via LMS assignments, LMS quizzes, Cadmus, Gradescope and FeedbackFruits. This style of feedback is typically reflective in nature, providing information to the student on how they performed. Feedback can be improved by also providing advice to students on what specific actions they can take to improve their performance on future assessment tasks.

Rubrics

Rubrics provide a structure to give feedback related to different aspects of a task. Different types of rubrics can show feedback as free-form or pre-written comments. Analytic rubrics provide staff markers and students descriptions for what an assignment looks like for each level of achievement e.g Excellent, Very Good, Good for each grading criterion. When presented to students before the commencement of an assessment task, analytic rubrics act as a form of feedforward where the rubric descriptors provide specific information on what qualities are required to succeed. This allows students to be reflective in their work by judging their own performance against the rubric. A reflective process can potentially boost performance and students are more aware of the strengths and weaknesses of their work.

Analytic rubrics can be used in conjunction with LMS assignments, quizzes, Cadmus and FeedbackFruits. Analytic rubrics can also be used for marking in Gradescope assignments.

Quizzes

LMS quizzes provide an opportunity for automatic feedback, which is particularly useful to provide quick feedback or feedback to all students in a large cohort. Questions that can be automatically marked included fill in the blank, formula, matching, multiple choice, numeric and true/false. Most of these question types also allow specific answer feedback, whereby you can provide a separate explanation for why each answer option is incorrect – this allows you to provide more tailored feedback to each student.

The file upload and essay question types are viewed by the marker through Speedgrader, and individual feedback can be added, however you can also provide general automatic feedback. For example, if you ask students to write an essay, general feedback can be built in and shown to students on submission that reminds students to include an argument and conclusion, and provides advice on structure.

H5P also provides some options for feedback based on quiz-style assessment tasks.

Peer feedback

Peer feedback can be used in a number of ways:

  • To provide students with feedback on the early stages of a plan or draft.
  • To increase the number of opportunities to receive feedback.
  • To expose students to a wider range of viewpoints.

Tools that can be used to manage peer review or peer feedback assignments include LMS assignments, FeedbackFruits: Peer Review and FeedbackFruits: Group Member Evaluation.

Resources

For more information on the tools described above, please see the following resources:

A great way begin to use these feedback tools in your teaching is to first explore them in your own Playpen subject in the LMS. For LMS assignments and Quizzes, you can create the activity or assessment, then use Student View to see feedback given to the Test Student. If you are exploring an external tool such as Cadmus, Gradescope or Feedback Fruits, you can add an External User to your Playpen to see the student experience.

Workshops on each of these topics are held periodically. See training and workshops for upcoming workshops.

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