How effective is your feedback to students? As we start the new term, why not try a technique that students love and learn from? Let me explain…
What form of feedback would you like?
Imagine you’ve just written a short story. You think it’s great, but before you try to get it published, you’ve asked for my constructive feedback on your draft. How would you like me to deliver this critique?
- I could write you a letter, detailing its flaws and suggesting improvements.
- Or I could mark up your manuscript with comments.
- Or we could talk it through over coffee.
- Or some combination of these.
But I have a better idea to help you understand your feedback.
Why your choice matters
To help you improve your story, you need feedback that is detailed, specific, thorough, personalised, and motivating. But if you opt for written feedback, my response is likely to suffer from several deficiencies. Written comments can be cryptic, complex, ambiguous, impersonal, and vague. They can lack the nuance needed to explain what I really think of your work. Instead of a ‘monologue by text’, perhaps we should talk?
Let’s dialogue
By talking through your work in person, we should be able to clear up any confusions with a simple back-and-forth conversation. But this has downsides too. Firstly we’ll need to find a compatible time in our busy schedules, and a suitable venue (with good coffee!). And I don’t know about you, but when I receive critical feedback up close and in person, I can feel embarrassed or become defensive. Of course I would try to be constructive. But unless you take detailed notes as we go, you may not fully absorb my real-time commentary.
Screencast can enhance feedback
Using screencast can overcome the deficiencies of traditional written feedback, and avoid the downsides of in-person encounters. How does it work? To review your draft story, I would display the manuscript on my computer, and then record the screen and my voice as I talk through my critique. I might have already highlighted a few sections for focus. And as I scroll through, I will point and click to direct your attention: you’ll see what I’m talking about in context. I might move back and forth in your document, showing you what I mean by moving a paragraph or changing your structure.
Yes, but…why is this better than writing?
In narrating over your draft, I can use my tone of voice to add nuance, encouragement, and emphasis. These are hard to get across in text. I might even risk a bit of humour that I would not dare try in text! And because I can speak more words per minute than I can type, you will get far more ‘bang for your feedback buck’ than if I’d written my response. If I’m smart about it, the whole thing will take me less time than doing the whole thing in writing.
After I’ve finished recording, I’ll send you a link to the video. You can then listen to it at your leisure, taking notes, pausing, rewinding, thinking. And then you can follow up if anything is still unclear: this is not meant as a ‘transaction’, but part of a dialogue.
Screencast can be dialogic
Research shows that screencast feedback can be more effective in helping students improve their work, especially if part of a wider learning conversation. My own scholarship and experience at Bristol has found that students feel like they are ‘talking their work through with their tutor’, even though screencast is an ‘asynchronous’ encounter where they watch a video in their own time.
And in contrast to traditional written feedback, students feel it ‘puts them in the mind of the marker’. In other words, they develop a better understanding of what the feedback means, how to interpret the assessment criteria, and how they can improve their work. Plus they find screencast more engaging and easier to absorb. It’s no surprise, then, that students just really like feedback delivered in this way, much preferring it to dealing with written comments. Research elsewhere has come to similar conclusions.
If screencast is so good, why aren’t you using it?
I have been using screencast for several years now to provide feedback on various types of formative assessment – project plans in group work, draft chapters for dissertations, outlines of coursework. And I’m not alone: several colleagues at Bristol and beyond recognise the value of screencast and have been developing their use of it.
But as a bit of an evangelist for this technique, I encounter many non-believers! People are unsure how to start, lack technical confidence, or are worried it will take longer than written feedback. I address these concerns in my How to Screencast — good practice guide v1.2. This offers advice and ideas for existing practitioners of screencast, as well as nervous novices. It is not meant to be a religious text from which to preach ‘the rules’, but it does sing the praises of screencast (in a reasoned, evidenced way, of course!). So if you’d like to try screencast, do download a copy.
What’s next?
Future episodes in this series will cover:
- Foundations of dialogic screencast: the theory and empirical research that argues in favour of screencast as a feedback method that supports learning conversations between staff and students
- Fast starts and quick wins: some guidance for novices interested in trying screencast in a low risk, minimum effort way
- Developing screencast practice: how users of screencast can hone their technique, improve their efficiency, and maximise the value of feedback they give
- Scaling up and expanding use: ideas for how screencast can be used more widely, and how this dialogic approach can fit into current and future curricula
In the meantime, consider how you provide feedback to students on their work: how well does it meet their needs? Is it engaging, motivating, detailed, specific, and clear enough for them to take action and learn? Is there any scope for more dialogue, more ‘learning conversations’ in these exchanges? If so, can you find a role for screencast in your teaching?
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