As modern education begins to move away from the traditional ways of assessing student mastery, I find that a primary part of any assessment is the feedback. I personally value feedback from my professors and my peers. It helps me to get a clearer perspective on my strengths, weakness and areas that can be improved. I also enjoy providing feedback for students. I have found ways in Pear Deck and Classkick to provide feedback while the students are working on assignments in class. Both of the programs have a feature where the teacher and student can chat within the program in real time. Classkick also has a "Raise your hand" feature. This allows the students to get a teachers attention within the assignment and receive help. I use this time as an opportunity to ask guiding questions, rather than just plain feedback. My hope is to keep them thinking and ask questions that help them find their way to the answer. I like to always tell students to use these features and I also make sure to tell students to check for feedback on assignments just in case they have suggestions, and an opportunity to resubmit an otherwise failing grade.
The students took their first weekly CFA (Content Formative Assessment) of this session last Thursday, and there were some patterns in the data that showed areas where the students were really struggling. So today, before we provided a reteach, we showed the software generated graphs from their CFA to the students and explained how we can work together to improve their outcomes and fill the gaps in knowledge to guide them into mastery. The students were curious about these graphs and really seemed to care about their learning outcomes. This type of feedback is new to me and was my CT's idea. I look forward to seeing how this weeks CFA turns out!
