How to Get Students to Respond to Feedback
Teachers and students do not always see eye to eye about feedback and grades. While teachers may diligently spend hours making suggestions for improvement to ideas and expressions on papers and projects, students often only care about the grade and may not even read the feedback, much less use it for improvement. This is unfortunate because specific, actionable, considerate, and timely feedback is so important for learning and one of the most valuable things teachers can do for students.
A few bold educators have piloted and shared some techniques for getting students to read and respond to instructor feedback. The idea is basically to integrate the grade into the feedback process. In their study, Redd & Kennette (2017), detail how they allow students to revise and resubmit writing assignments for points so long as they incorporate the feedback into the revision.

Louden (2017) takes this a step further. Her method is to “delay the grade” altogether and only return feedback without a grade. Before getting the grade, students must first read and respond to the feedback and use a rubric to give themselves a grade. This forces students to reflect on how well they actually fulfilled the requirements and gives them the opportunity to improve before the final grade drops.

How do you get students to respond to your feedback? Let us know !

Last Friday of Every Month at Noon
433 Sherrod Library

Tuesday, August 6th, 2019
8:30AM -4:00PM
ETSU's Millennium Center

Redd, Bibia R., & Kennette, Lynne N. (2017). Getting students to read instructor feedback (and maybe actually learn from It). College Quarterly, 20(2), 11. Link.

Louden, K. (2017). Delaying the grade: How to get students to read feedback. Cult of Pedagogy website. Link.