Feedback is one of the most powerful factors in academic learning and resultant achievements. Earlier in this course, you've learned how assessment can support learning. Do you remember the article from Gibson Simpson on this topic? They see assessment as a source of feedback and they provide conditions for effective feedback. One of these conditions was, that feedback should be given both often and be detailed enough. So, take a moment to reflect, how often do you use assessments to provide feedback to your students? And how detailed is this feedback? Do you provide a lot? Or do you have to admit you give too little feedback? Why is this feedback so important for students? And how can you give feedback in such a way that students really experience it as something useful? In this video, I will explain briefly the importance of feedback and I will introduce you to some basic principles about feedback. Let's start with the student perspective. When you ask students what they think feedback is and why it is important to them, we can state this: they want to know how to improve their work so that they can do it better next time. They tend to be future focused and are not that interested in how they have done so far. For them, that's very different from receiving critical feedback. Hearing all the things they did wrong doesn't help them. On the other hand, teachers often believe that it is useful to be critical in students work. They often have the tendency to focus on what went wrong and not necessarily on what or how to improve it next time. The important role of feedback is to assist learners in improving their performances. There has been a lot of research on the effect of feedback. John Hatzis synthesises over 800 Meta-analysis on the influences on achievements in students. In this synthesis, he found that feedback was associated with an effect size of 0.73 indicating it is one of the most powerful factors implicated in academic learning and resultant achievement. On the other hand, we also see that the variability of the effectiveness of feedback is huge. Which means that not every type of feedback definitely works. It teaches us that we have to think about and prepare feedback carefully because, we all want to have this huge impact on student learning, don't we? But what it actually is the aim of feedback? I think Sadler's notion of the gap helps to explain this. Feedback aims to reduce the gap between where the students is and where they are meant to be. So the gap between prior or current achievements and the learning objectives are success criteria. Therefore, it is important that students know where they are, and what the learning objectives are. Then they can focus on the way of getting where they are meant to be. Hattie reframed this into three feedback questions. Where am I going? How am I going? And Where to next? So for you as a teacher, it is important to be clear about where the students are going. Clear and specific learning objectives are again, absolutely essential. Not only course objectives but also the learning objectives for each lecture, lesson, or assignment are required. You can consider the questions, How am I going? And where to next? In a way you provide feedback towards your students. What progress is being made towards the goal? And what activities need to be undertaken next to make better progress? But when and how do you give feedback? It can be useful to think about this before you are going to teach a course. When you have decided on the learning objectives, assessments, and learning activities, you can think of when and how you want students to receive feedback. Both the learning activities and the assessments provide opportunities to give feedback. There are different ways of doing this, you could think of written feedback, oral feedback, automated feedback via online quizzes, or peer feedback. Each of these types of feedback can have different forums. For example, written feedback can be provided at via a rubric and oral feedback can be provided face to face or via video or recording. And take into account that a great on itself also provides feedback to students. Do you know more method of feedback? Here you see a template which you can use to prepare your feedback for the whole course. The so-called feedback plan. I will explain this template using an example of one week of a course. In the first column, you can fill in the weeks of your course. So we will start with one. Then, in the second column, you can fill in all learning activities and assessment that you planned for your course. In this example, I fill in lecture, tutorial, and group assignment. Then, in the third column you can fill in the method of feedback you would like to use. You don't have to feel obliged to provide feedback on every activity or assessment. In this case, I fill in automated feedback via an online quiz during lecture, peer review of first part of group assignment, and written feedback. Do you see there is a variation in feedback methods? You can use the fourth column to indicate who will be giving the feedback. In this case, automated feedback via tool, a peer, and a teacher. Finally, in the last column you fill in what material needs to be created or gathered to make the feedback happen. In this week's activity, you will be challenged to create your own feedback plan. This will help you to prepare for providing feedback before you start teaching. This way the chances are higher that you actually will get enough feedback to indeed support students learning. One way that will help you with giving feedback is to make use of a rubric. In the next videos, I will explain to you what rubrics are and what types of rubrics are common to use. I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next video. Keep up the good work. You can do this.