Providing feedback

The University’s requirements for providing student feedback are outlined in the Assessment of Courses Policy.

On this page

• Pre-submission
• Marking rubrics
• Whole class summary
• Utilising feedback
• Quizzes
• Feedback in practice

Effective feedback enhances learning, engagement and assessment performance. Feedback should include strengths and weaknesses the learner has demonstrated, and feed forward, i.e., suggest strategies for improvement in future activities or assessment tasks.

Pre-submission

Where appropriate, inform students of opportunities to obtain automated feedback on the quality of their work before they submit.

• Automate feedback on plagiarism through Turnitin. Create a separate ungraded draft assignment in Canvas so students can receive a Turnitin similarity report before they submit their final version for grading.
• Remind students to use spelling and grammar tools such as Grammarly.

Marking rubrics

• Marking rubrics clarify the required elements of an assessment task and can help students review the quality of their assignment before submitting.
• Rubrics supports a more consistent and objective grading scheme.
• Rubrics also provide feedback to students on their performance in each criterion.
• Adding a rubric to an assignment in Canvas can make marking and providing feedback more efficient, especially when grading with rubrics in Canvas’ SpeedGrader.

Instructor guides:

• How do I add a rubric to an assignment?
• How do I use a rubric to grade submissions in SpeedGrader?
• How do I use free-form comments instead of ratings in a rubric in SpeedGrader?

When marking an assignment in Canvas with a rubric that has performance level descriptors:

• The marker can enhance the effectiveness of the feedback by providing further written comments for each criterion and for the assignment overall.
• Overall feedback on a particular submission may be entered more quickly using the speech-to-text function or a short video recording.
• Using a Comment Library to create a bank of comments can make providing feedback more consistent.

Instructor guide:

• How do I use the Comment Library in SpeedGrader?

Whole class summary

• A summary of the overall performance of the class on an assignment can reinforce the concepts and skills that students need to demonstrate. It can also encourage students to reflect further on their own performance.
• Canvas Rubrics Analytics provides the average performance level of the whole class in each criterion in the rubric. This may enhance efficiency when summarising feedback, particularly with larger classes.
• A summary from a previous class may also help later cohorts with the same assignment.

Utilising feedback

• Encourage students to make use of suggestions from feedback on past assessments.
• Prompt students to use feedback to help identify specific areas for improvement.
• Guidance for students on using feedback is available via Learning Essentials.

Quizzes

• Create automated feedback (YouTube 01:02 min) when setting up self-marking quizzes (e.g., MCQs, true/ false, fill in the blanks) in Canvas or other quiz authoring tools (e.g., H5P).
• Embedded feedback can include which answer is correct, why a response is right or wrong, suggested strategies to generate a correct response and which specific learning materials to review.