Feedback and Student Motivation

Taken from http://kathia909.deviantart.com/art/Tree-feb-2012-285369975

Feedback and Student Motivation A Sample from India

By Prof. Devika S. Pathak School of Fashion, Styling & Textiles Pearl Academy, India Saturday, February 13, 2016 Post 210

I had the chance to get to know of Prof. Devika S. Pathak while I was delivering an online course on Higher Education for Laureate International Universities’ Faculty Development. Devika’s thoughtful insights along the course made me and –no doubt- her partners also reflect on our current way of teaching and providing learners with feedback.

I invited her to become a guest writer for this blog with one of her forum participations in our course, and to honor her thoughtfulness and clarity in mind when discussing feedback provision and student motivation, here you have a very good example of how feedback can have a powerful effect on learners and their learning.

Feedbacks are an essential element of any kind of learning. Feedbacks are

guidelines that help us evaluate knowledge enhancement and subsequent growth. Regular inputs received by a mentor or a tutor helps us to align ourselves with the required brief in case we go off-track , and /or strengthen and reinforce our progress if we are on –track.

When I was a student 16-17 years ago, we had no rubrics systems of evaluation; it was just hard-core marks assigned. I remember a certain tutor who taught us model drawing – gave us an outdoor assignment to draw and paint trees.

I had the toughest time with that assignment (despite being good with sketching).

The tutor saw my work and said “do it again – this has no life.”

I interpreted ‘life’ in my own way, and I redid the assignment. This time round she said, “where are the colors, give the trees depth- redo it.” So I redid the whole assignment again with more ‘depth’ with more greens and browns and various other shades that I could see. Finally, she took the assignment and marked me averagely and said, “you should’ve given more depth to the trees.” Though I was marked and I did a redo twice over but I was still unclear of what was actually needed.

When I reflect on that incident today, I feel that as a student I was too hesitant to ask the tutor for any further clarity on improvement. Maybe I did not understand the adjectives used for feedback. Had I been able to ask or had my tutor been able to explain what depth meant, what life in trees meant …. I could have had better understanding had delivered better work too. Clearly in my case I was a lost student (for that subject) and kept shooting in the dark to get it right.

Another point is that had the tutor been able to convey all aspects of the feedback it would have helped.

So the feedbacks are very crucial, it helps to communicate the criteria which have been missed. It helps to bridge the gap between the tutors and taught; also the learning is deeper and clearer.

Over the years as a tutor I have realized that any kind of feedback should start with a positive comment... Then followed by suggestions and scope of improvements. It doesn’t help to be harsh or rude with words because it intimidates the student and he/she can go into a shell. Rather, via our feedbacks, we need to motivate, inspire and enhance their learning abilities.

Identifying particular aspects of the assignment that need further improvement , or clarity , or more case studies etc. will help the student fill in those gaps for future work as well. A rubric helps to have a comparative study and fairly evaluate all students along the same parameters.

For me feedback is an interactive dialogue rather than just an association with grades. When I have a presentation assignment given to the class, I usually follow

it up with a feedback session. After students have done all the presentations, I initiate a feedback dialogue discussing various aspects like:     

Was the presentation well conducted?

Was the presentation layout clear?

Was the language of communication good? (formal approach or informal approach) Was the audience engaged in the presentation?

Was the content informative?

This kind of an open dialogue is also a feedback method – which involves your peers and tutor. Whenever I start a feedback I try to add a positive adjective to it and then gradually flow onto areas of satisfactory work and areas that could be improved upon. My main purpose is to keep the student’s motivation up and to inculcate the need for enhanced learning or knowledge.