Wes Neal Post # 3: Providing Feedback.

Providing feedback to students is essential for motivating students to want to learn. Not only does it allow the students to follow their progress, but it is also used to encourage them and guide them in their activities. If the teacher wants the student to reach the ultimate instructional goals in class, then they must be steered in the right direction. The teacher I worked with always makes it a point to provide feedback to the students instead of simply writing a grade at the top of their papers. This is especially true on anything that he assigned that required some thought put into it such as short answer questions on the tests, or conclusion questions at the end of a lab exercise. He still marks their answers right or wrong of course, but he adds comments to help the students too. For example, if a student has almost arrived at a correct response, the teacher tells them something like, "almost there, think about it in terms of.....). This way the student knows they were on the right track, and where to go from then. If the student just had it wrong altogether, the teacher fills in some information that would have gotten the to the right response. This way they at least knew where they were going wrong, and would be able to fix it in the future. Finally, he adds encouraging comments to the responses that were especially well thought out, such as a "Good job!" As simple as this may seem, the students loved getting praise, and it seems to be working because the same kids who tend to get these responses keep churning them out. When I first began grading the activities I had assigned for my unit, the first thing the teacher wanted to see was if I had been adding comments. He was happy to see that I had been, and told me how important it was to let the kids know when they were doing a good job, or to steer them in the right direction if they were getting a little off course.