A little more about your class:

Psych 250: 22 person class, writing intensive course

The issue you’re addressing:

How to make feedback (especially peer feedback) actionable, immediate, and delivered at the right time in a digestible way for students.

Tell us a bit more about your teaching innovation:

I created a google form where students submitted “feedforward” statements (I notice…; I wonder…; What if…; How might…) to one another after a class presentation of content destined for a paper by each student at the end of the semester (on a study they conducted and were reporting the results of in their paper). Each student presented, and for every student that presented, all students completed the google form to submit feedforward statements. I took the responses to these forms and downloaded them, sorted the excel sheet by student, and then was able to send ~40 feedforward statements to every student on the day they gave their presentation, ~10 days before their paper was due. This allowed every student to get lots of timely feedback in an effective and organized fashion with a low-effort solution. I am considering adapting this structure to next semesters class from the beginning through asynchronous lighting talks posted on blackboard that students can then respond to.

Your initial takeaways:

It seems that students got a lot more information that they may have taken only a snapshot of to apply to their final papers. It also seems that the feedforward structure helped in providing more effective feedback, but some students still didn’t put in effort (or attention) that would truly make this deeply beneficial for the student receiving the feedforward statements.

Suggested “podcast pairing”:

Joe Hirsch on “Moving from Feedback to Feedforward” (The Cult of Pedagogy podcast)