A familiar scene…

When I taught middle school band, I used to assign a weekly playing test each week for every student in my band. Then, on Friday afternoons I would lock my office and listen to the same 25 second excerpts from students and evaluate them with a rubric. I had around 125 students, so evaluating and uploading grades would take me until around 8:00pm. Over the weekend, students could review their feedback on my rubric, and elect to practice and “retake” the same test the next week (in addition to their new playing test). Often students would come back after appearing to read their feedback, spending some part of the weekend engaging in targeted practice, and retake their playing test (with improvement!). However, a not insignificant number of students would retake their playing tests seemingly without referencing the feedback I had provided them, and would make the same mistakes in their second recording. This was frustrating for both the student and myself.

The goal was admirable: I wanted students to get regular, high quality feedback. I prioritized time outside of the school day for this purpose, created a plan, and acted on it. Yet
I wasn’t seeing the results I was hoping for in students. I wanted more students to internalize this feedback and know what to do with it! Does this sound familiar to you, colleague?

Effective Feedback 

It took awhile, but eventually I realized that my feedback was not as effective as I had imagined. I have since learned that effective feedback – according to educational researcher John Hattie (2021) – encompasses five key principles.1 Broadly, effective feedback is:

• Accurate – tied to a specific element or skill in a specific place

• Relevant – tied to the specific task

• Accessible – communicated in a way that the student understands

• Timely – provided as close to the time of students’ submission as possible

• Actionable – directs students’ behavior without telling them what to do

It took awhile, but eventually I realized that the feedback was not explicitly relevant, accessible, or actionable to students. And, that no matter how accurate or timely feedback was, those barriers were limiting how well students could internalize the feedback. This realization spurred me to make two changes:

• I edited my holistic rubric, and made it an analytical rubric with detailed descriptors for each rating. I also added a comment column at the end of each criterion, so that comments for each criterion were better aligned and relevant to the specific task at hand.

• I explicitly taught my students how to interpret the rubric AND translate that into practice habits to improve in subsequent playing tests. To do this, I created checklists of practice habits for each criterion assessed on the rubric. 

The result? Within a quarter, students were making significantly better progress on the playing tests, I was grading fewer second attempts, and I got to drop practice logs (which were highly ineffective in motivating students to practice anyways!). 

Putting In the Practice

Since that position, I have taught in several other schools and universities. My feedback practices and philosophy has also changed with the advent of newer technologies and platforms (TikTok, anyone?). So, you might think “how does the experience of a music teacher translate to MY _________ classroom when using Feedback Studio?” 

You might even think that a music teacher would be hard pressed to use Feedback Studio, given that the Similarity checker does not read pictures or sheet music. But, all teachers can still use Feedback Studio to deliver meaningful feedback through the grading layer. Moreover, all teachers can benefit from critically evaluating their feedback practices within those five principles. 

Some tips:

• Use Feedback Studio for the feedback capability, not just the Similarity and Red Flags checkers!

• Use a rubric to evaluate student work. You can use your own, adopt one from Turnitin, or select and adapt one from the dozens of templates on Turnitin’s resource pages. If you don’t know how to start, check out the training videos!

• Make a new rubric for the task you are assessing. Turnitin has great resources for rubric design!

• Align your QuickMarks to the criterion in your rubric.

• Give summary voice and/or text comments on student work! Students like hearing your voice, and it helps them synthesize the feedback into action.

Goodluck on your feedback journey! Please share success stories, wonderments, and questions below! 

Works Referenced

1 https://www.turnitin.com/resources/where-to-next-feedback#download