Fast Food Feedback: Make it Worth It!

Fast food is great because it is (usually) fast: as a consumer, you don't need to cook, wash dishes, or sometimes even get out of your car. However, if you just scarf down the food without tasting it, then you've wasted the experience.

Fast formative assessment is a little like that: if we don't take the time to "savor" that feedback, then  the effort of collecting the data was not worth it.

Most of our students are used to these faster computer-based assessments, whether in the Illustrative Math platform, on a Kahoot, or a teacher-made Google form. The benefit of having computer-based testing should be the ease of feedback: in mere moments, something that would have taken at least a half hour to mark has been scored and can be accessible to students for feedback, at least in terms of knowing what they got right and wrong.

So, how do we make students do more with that feedback than just look at the score?

Solution 1: Teacher-Made Groups

Look at the data and make some strategic decisions: are there questions that most students got wrong that warrant a whole class reteaching? Are there students in the class who got a commonly missed question right and could act as "experts" to help during a station rotation review activity? Are there groups of students who would benefit from small group re-teaching on a topic?

Solution 2: Student-Led Groups

Shift the responsibility to the students: Might you build in time for students to identify the top questions to review as a class? Might they work together to write explanations for the top (2, 3, 5?) questions they got wrong, but upon reviewing with peers, etc., they now know how to answer correctly? Might they have to share how they would do better on a similar question in the future, or write their own version of the question to show they understand?

What other solutions do you have for making students more responsible for using fast feedback?