3c. Feedback in active teaching and learning

Course subject(s) 3. Active teaching and learning

Apart from the fact that students actually learn more, active teaching and learning provides information to both students and teachers on how well students are doing. In a traditionally taught course, there’s some form of assessment at the end of the course. Only then do both students and teacher find out how well the students have grasped the content. For students who fail the assessment, it’s too late to put in more effort and study harder, they will have to wait for the resit. For you as the teacher, it’s too late to help students learn better.

By using active teaching and learning, students will be engaging with the material during the course, which will provide both them and you with feedback on how well they are grasping that material. As long as information is simply offered to students, it is very appealing for both parties to assume that students understand it. However, when they actually have to do something with the information, it will become clear whether they have really understood it.

Students receiving feedback on their learning during a course, is a key element of active teaching and learning. This doesn’t mean however, that you as a teacher have to assess everything every student is doing. Students can give feedback to eachother (peer feedback), it can be automated with the help of ICT or students can be provided with the right answers so they can check for themselves

Formative feedback is provided during the learning process of the students. This kind of feedback is purely meant to support the learning process and has no consequences for the grade of a student.

Summative feedback is provided during or at the end of the course but does have consequences for the grade of a student.

A summative assessment should, during the course, be preceded by formative feedback so that students have the chance to become aware what their possible difficulties and pitfalls with the matter at hand are. One way of doing this is dealing with assignments that have the same structure/essence as the ones they will be assessed on during the summative assessment (consult the constructive alignment chapter in the first section of this Bb course if necessary).

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Development of Teaching and Active Learning by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://ocw.tudelft.nl/courses/development-teaching-active-learning/.
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