Timeliness in Feedback

Faculty understand the act of process improvement to teaching methods.  Each time we teach a class we experiment with new activities, assessments, or lectures in a hope to improve the outcomes,  In this process improvement approach new ideas are implemented, these new ideas are evaluated to determine the relative success of the ideas, and modifications are made to these ideas to be implemented during the next iteration of the course or lecture.  Through this process improvement, we learn from our mistakes and our successes.

We need to keep this process improvement approach in mind with our students as well.  Our students are often challenged to apply new concepts in our course assessments.  However, too often I see faculty simply associate a score with the assessment.  If the students are not provided with sufficient feedback on their performance on the assessment, how then are they to make improvements?  This need for feedback to make improvements is especially important where we require the students to build upon skills throughout the semester.

As faculty, we need to provide feedback aimed at both celebrating their successes with the assessment as well as feedback aimed at helping them understand where they need to improve.  Additionally, this feedback provides another avenue for us to teach.  We can use the assessments as a means to not only evaluate the student's mastery of the topics but also to help them identify improvements to their understanding and application of the material.

This feedback is essential to the process improvement we want to see in our students.  However, the timing of the feedback is just as important as the feedback itself.  We need to provide feedback while the material is fresh in the minds of the students and, this is especially important, before they are asked to use these skills or knowledge in the next assessment.  Our students need to receive our feedback and reflect on the feedback in order to improve during the next iteration of the assessment.  Our timeliness must be considered an important factor in helping our students improve their performance.