Streamlining Feedback Delivery Through Rubrics and Exemplars

• In Event: Practical Issues in Classroom Assessment: Deconstructing and Reconstructing Research to Offer Practical Recommendations

Abstract

Feedback is one of the most powerful variables in education as it has been documented in hundreds of studies (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Lipnevich & Smith, 2018). Regardless of the debate about the final effect size of feedback over educational achievement (Wisniewski et al., 2020), what the vast majority of educational researchers agree upon is that without feedback learning is unlikely to occur. The problem is that in a typical instructional setting most feedback that students receive comes from teachers, and in contexts where the number of students is growing, providing high quality feedback can be an unsurmountable task (Broadbent et al., 2018). This is one of the reasons why involving students in effective self-assessment and generation of high quality self-feedback can carry positive effects for all involved (Nicol, 2020). That is, students will benefit from honing their self-assessment skills, and teachers could invest time previously spent on providing feedback into a variety of strategic instructional activities that provide opportunities for students’ internal feedback generation.
This presentation will report results of an experimental study that explored the effects of rubrics and exemplars on writing performance. Two hundred and six 9th and 10th grade students participated. Students were asked to write an essay and revise it based on the information provided to them under 4 conditions: Control, Rubrics, Exemplars, and Combined condition (rubrics and exemplars). After submitting the revised version of their essay, students in experimental conditions were trained on how to use rubrics and exemplars. Students were then asked to write another essay and revise it based on the information, consistent with their experimental group membership (i.e., control, rubric, exemplars, combined). We found that students in the Rubrics condition benefited the most, closely followed by students in the Exemplars condition, and then the Combined condition. The performance across conditions was somewhat variable for the three performance outcomes. Furthermore, the improvement in the usage of the tools following the training session was the highest for the Exemplars condition. Studies with undergraduate and graduate students will also be reported.
This presentation will conclude with practical suggestions on how teachers can encourage students to use both rubrics and exemplars to generate self-feedback and improve performance and learning.

Authors

• Anastasiya A. Lipnevich, Queens College - CUNY

• Ernesto Panadero, Dublin City University