Feedback
How will feedback be provided?
Teachers need to monitor individual student’s work and consider and employ the most effective forms of feedback. Feedback may include oral, visual or tangible forms.
Appropriate feedback during and following learning experiences assists students to demonstrate achievement of outcomes. Feedback involves:
- providing frequent, specific, immediate and, where appropriate, corrective feedback about student responses
- providing feedback on strategies being used, linking those strategies to prior or future learning. For example, the teacher may say, ‘That’s a great drawing of the problem. That will help you work out whether you need to add or subtract to find the answer.’
- immediately correcting errors that will affect the result (eg writing numbers in the wrong column when using the algorithm for addition of two-, three- and four-digit numbers)
- providing specific feedback on student effort (eg ‘Great work, you used a number of strategies to try and solve the problem.’)
- assisting students to reflect on their learning through teacher questioning
- redirecting students who are off-task.
The Mathematics K–6 Syllabus (PDF, 201 pages, 960 KB – refer page 139) has more information on feedback.
Teacher questioning 6
The teacher can help students to reflect on their learning by asking questions or instructing students to explain their thinking as part of the feedback process. For example:
- How did you work it out?
- Show me how you worked it out.
- How did you know that 8 + 2 = 10?
- What have you tried?
- What steps did you take?
- Did you follow the instructions (scaffold)?
- Did you have a strategy?
- If you broke it down, what were the steps?
- Explain what you were thinking.
- What do you think comes next?
- How did you know when you were finished?
References
6. Howell, KW & Nolet, V 2000, Curriculum-based Evaluation: Teaching and decision making, 3rd edn, Merrill, Columbus, OH, p 334.
