I’ve never been a big fan of lists and checklists. Their condensed statements oversimplify and sound definitive, as if that’s all there is to know. Often, they claim more than they can deliver— “best policies to prevent multitasking,” for instance. My hesitancy about them rubs against how meaningful many teachers find them. They’re attracted to their clarity, brevity, and the convenient way they present information. Lists and checklists offer knowledge in a nutshell, and like nuts, what’s on the lists supplies easy-to-consume, nutritional information.

My rethinking about their role as a source of instructional knowledge was prompted by a set of “principles of good feedback practice,” defined broadly by their proposers as “anything that might strengthen students’ capacity to self-regulate their own performance” (Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2010, p. 205). When I first read the principles, I thought how nicely they framed feedback practice, usefully bordering the space within which it needs to operate if the goal is development of self-assessment skills.

Here’s what good feedback practice does:

• It helps clarify what good performance is. Students do self-assess. They do so with their own goals (what they hope to achieve, what they think the teacher wants). And research has shown that teacher and student goals, along with the criteria relevant to those goals, often aren’t matched. That disconnect isn’t just a student problem. “Most criteria for academic tasks are complex, multidimensional and difficult to articulate; they are often ‘tacit’ and unarticulated in the mind of the teacher” (p. 206). Students need clear definitions, explanations, and exemplars to understand assignment goals and assessment criteria. Without that knowledge, they can’t accurately judge their work.
• It facilitates the development of self-assessment (reflection) in learning. Using their own goals and criteria, students routinely make judgments about their work. They decide when a paper is done, when they’ve studied enough, or when they can execute the skill. Frequently they make poor decisions—visible to us but not to them. Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick recommend that we “create more structured opportunities for self-monitoring and the judging of progression to goals” (p. 207).
• It delivers high-quality information to students about their learning. Teacher feedback matters to most students. It should benchmark their progress, by doing more than pointing out the mistakes and questionable quality. According to the authors, “good quality external feedback” provides information that helps students “troubleshoot” and “self-correct” (p. 208). It’s feedback that students can do something about.
• It encourages teacher and peer dialogue around learning. The practice here involves discussion, not just information transmission from teacher to student. The exchange of feedback commentary occurs between the teacher and the students, and among the students. Sometimes understanding comes more quickly when a peer frames the explanation. The practice of peer feedback helps students gain a more objective perspective—the detachment they need when looking at their own work.
• It encourages positive motivational beliefs and self-esteem. Good feedback practice accomplishes this goal when it is not only about success or failure or how a grade compares to those earned by others. Students get motivated and convinced of their capabilities when the feedback also contains information about progress and achievement and includes multiple low-stakes tasks and opportunities for revision.
• It provides opportunities to close the gap between current and desired performance. Do students learn from the feedback they receive? We see the answer by looking at how they respond to the feedback. Does their work improve, or do they repeat the same mistakes in their next performance? Here the authors emphasize the importance of designing assignments so that students can close the gap while they’re working on an assignment or while they repeat an earlier performance. “External feedback should support both processes; it should help students to recognize the next steps in learning and how to take them, both during production and in relation to the next assignment” (p. 213).
• It provides information to teachers that can be used to help shape the teaching. Teachers need good data on student progress. Providing good feedback depends on knowing what causes students difficulties, where misunderstandings occur, and which assignment details contribute to learning successes. That’s data students can deliver if teachers ask for it.

I like three features of this list. First, it’s focused on practices, framed as a set of actions that collectively advance the effectiveness of feedback directed at a specific goal. Examples of policies and practices that exemplify each principle are included in the article. Second, I like how it hangs together conceptually—built around the notion that feedback should make students less dependent on feedback. We’ve long assumed that our feedback develops students’ abilities to self-assess, but we haven’t tried to advance that goal explicitly. These principles show us how, and in the process they offer a fuller and more accurate description of feedback. Finally, it’s not a set of “best” principles but of “good” ones, leaving open the possibility of others along with refinements of these.        

Reference

Nicol, D. J., & Macfarlane-Dick, D. (2010). Formative assessment and self-regulation of learning: A model and seven principles of good feedback practice. Studies in Higher Education, 31(2), 199–218. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075070600572090