24.5: Responding to Formative Feedback With Immediate, Minor Changes

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Collecting the student feedback is just the beginning. However, you do not have to, and should not, wait until the end of the term to start introducing changes as a result of what you learn from the students. For instance, students may use the different instruments to ask you to be more flexible in the teaching approach, to maintain a good attitude towards students and their ideas, to use more appropriate assessment methods, or to add more real-world application to the content.

To continue engaging students in the process, go over the formative feedback results with them and solicit suggestions for changes. I tell my students that, to me, “constructive criticism” means that they must help construct solutions to problems or issues that they find. Together, the students and I look at survey results or rubric scores, and any comments about a specific teaching effectiveness criterion. If no comments address how I can change to meet their needs, then I ask them to give me suggestions. In one case, the students stated that I sometimes used terms from the field that were not used or defined in the readings. The short-term solution was to create a short vocabulary list for each unit, based on both experiences and readings. I chose to do this myself, but I could have involved the students even further by having the class generate vocabulary lists for each unit, based on words that each student had to look up individually.

Students may ask you to do a number of things related to the course or how it is set up:

To clarify your expectations, update your course objectives, create more detailed instructions for assignments, or identify how students will be evaluated for each learning objective more clearly.
To improve the online course structure or organization, consolidate all resources, activities, and assessment strategies related to each learning objective.
To show more knowledge of the course material, create and upload recorded lectures, upload your presentations, and provide information about any research that you have done related to the course content.
To increase the variety of avenues for students to reach learning objectives, provide resources in different formats (e.g., video clips, text readings, charts and graphs) and encourage students to demonstrate knowledge or skills in different ways, if possible (also see Chapter 11, Accessibility and Universal Design).
To provide more opportunities for active learning, create small group discussions around materials or assignments, use collaborative tools such as wikis (see Chapter 25, Tools for Engagement and Collaboration), and assign students to online study groups.
To show the relevance of coursework to the world, assign students to relate course content to current news, provide examples of current research in the field (e.g., published articles) as optional readings, and invite experts in the field to participate in online activities such as discussion forums.

24.5.1.png — Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Moodle LMS item analysis

24.5.2.png — Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Blackboard LMS item statistics

Students may also ask you to change how you facilitate different online course components:

To improve communication with students, put clear deadlines and policies (e.g., late submissions) in your syllabus, but let students know that you will vary online components to meet their needs,
To provide timely, appropriate feedback, give yourself grading deadlines and use short rubrics that tell students why their work is good or needs improvement.
To demonstrate how enthusiastic or approachable you are, hold virtual office hours and encourage students to contact you for help.
Demonstrate your willingness to make changes based on student feedback, outline your feedback process for students, tell students directly that you will make reasonable changes that will improve student learning, and let them know what changes you make, along with the rationale for each change.
To show respect to students and their ideas, acknowledge student viewpoints even if they contrast with your own, and bring good ideas to the attention of the other students, even if you do not name students specifically.
To create and maintain a safe environment for expression, include a “Netiquette” policy in your syllabus, model the types of responses that you want students to employ, enforce your policies when students do not follow them (also see Chapter 26, Techno Expression).

To close student performance gaps identified by indirect feedback methods, you can provide extra resources (e.g., websites, articles, or additional attention during face-to-face lectures or online recorded lectures), extra activities (e.g., self-assessment quizzes, discussion forums, wikis), or both.