A Case for Fast Feedback
by Felipe Almeida - OAPT Newsletter, May 2021
Fantasy Second Career
Yes, teaching is a wonderful profession, but surely you've thought about what your fantasy second career would be, no? For me, easily, it's stand-up comedian.
Making people laugh, bringing joy to the world... sounds like a pretty good way to make a living. I like challenges, and engaging an audience of strangers for any amount of time is extremely difficult to do. But the real draw to being a stand-up comedian is its highly efficient and effective mechanism for feedback.
If you get up on stage and say something you think is funny, you'll immediately know how much the audience agrees. If you can get over the frigid-to-lukewarm response (no comedic bit is hilarious at first attempt), then the journey to hilarity can begin through the iterative process of doing, reflecting, modifying, and re-doing.
That the process is guided by the audience makes it incredibly instructive, and that the (committed) stand-up runs through it so many times makes it incredibly amenable to risk-taking. Why not try a weird bit when you can quickly move on to another, when the audience already half-expects weird bits, and when the next night you can pretend it never happened?
Learning and Risk-Taking, For Students?
Enough fantasizing - I'm not going to give up my regular job! In fact, I hear 'learning and risk-taking' and I start thinking about how to help my students do more of them. Wouldn't that be great? But they don't want to be funny, they want to be educated. Their process, then, should look like the following:
But unlike the stand-up whose delay between doing a bit and receiving high-quality, detailed feedback from the audience is negligible (arrow ②), the student's delay, which depends entirely on the teacher, is far from it. Maybe if our classes consisted of only a single student could the delay be sufficiently short, but even then, the time at which students do work does not always overlap with the time when we are available (e.g. I'm fast asleep at 2:00 AM). Despite our best intentions, feedback as immediate as the stand-up's is not going to come from us.
The only reasonble way to optimize arrow ② for students is to automate it. Computers can do 'immediate', but to ensure they also do 'high quality' and 'detailed', they it will need help interpreting student work. This means we as teachers need to think creatively about how to do arrow ①.
Arrows ① and ② with Google Forms and Portioned Practice
One way of optimizing arrows ① and ② is by combining the auto-correction abilities of Google Forms with portioned practice. Below is a sample (feel free to submit responses).
Students get detailed, immediate feedback on highly scaffolded practice problems, any time of day or night. Feedback can come one entry at a time, a whole problem ata a time, or even a whole form at a time - the students decide.
In truth, it is a bit of a google forms hack and the result is a little clunky, but it still gets the job done. When using the forms with students in a virtual class setting, I noticed and the following benefits:
- Increased engagement (students did their homework!).
- “We have a sense of which areas we need more work on.” - student quote.
- “I enjoy… being able to keep trying until I get them correct.” - student quote.
- Participation of the clueless, identification of the clueless. 1
- Improved paper-work. 2
- The resolution of student questions that do not require teacher expertise (freeing up valuable time for questions that do).
The Forms
Want to try them yourself? Forms for SPH3U can be found here.
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Much of the content this article was part of a 'Physics Hour' presentation for the Ontario Association of Physics Teachers (OAPT) (March, 2021), as well as separate article written for their newsletter (May, 2021).
1 In the sample form provided, for example, there are 14 possible sketches to choose from, so a student could simply try every option until they get the correct one. You'd expect any student to use this strategy to have no clue about how to solve physics problems on their own. But! The clueless student that uses this strategy is still participating and getting feedback! Certainly this is better than the alternative (i.e. silently checking-out as the course passes them by). You wouldn't want this practice to continue, but the use of this strategy can be caught in the forms results and teachers can then quickly intervene.
2 On evaluations where students submitted their work on paper, a lot less of it resembled example A and more of it resembled example B (B reflects the answer keys from the practice forms).
