Feedback Characteristics—Content

This interactive and the companion Feedback Characteristics—Usability are designed to help you think about the characteristics of feedback. This interactive focuses on the content characteristics, those related to communicating the substance of the student's work and how to improve. (The other interactive focuses on the usability characteristics, those related to making the feedback usable by the student.)

In each interactive, you will see several examples of feedback that might be provided on two samples of student work for the same task. You will consider whether each example fits one of the characteristics. Note that the examples provided, even those that appear to fit all the focus characteristics, are examples and not necessarily intended to be seen as exemplars.

For more on feedback, see Chapter 4, "Providing and Using Formative Feedback," in Bringing Math Students into the Formative Assessment Equation: Tools and Strategies for the Middle Grades.

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Click to Start

Step 1.Take a look below at the Learning Intention and Success Criteria for this lesson, and at the outline of the lesson. Note that the task you will be looking at (the independent work) is just one part of the lesson. The task may not address all of the Success Criteria.

Press the "next" button at right when you're ready to continue.

Step 2. Work through the "Independent Work Task" yourself, before you continue to see what the students did.

Step 3. Review the students' work.

Step 4. For each piece of student work, several feedback examples have been provided. Click a teacher's thumbnail picture to see that teacher's feedback.

Then, on the left, indicate whether you think the feedback fits the characteristic shown. (You can always come back later and change your answer.) If our evaluation agrees with yours, the thumbnail will gain a solid green border. If we don't agree, the thumbnail will gain a double red border. Disagreement doesn't necessarily mean you are wrong. We simply might be interpreting things differently.

You can choose to stay with one characteristic and go through all teachers' feedback before moving on to the other characteristic. Or, you may switch to the other characteristic and look at the same feedback using the new characteristic. Use the tabs to switch between characteristics.

You may also use the "Check" button (which appears when a choice has been made for the example showing) to see our reasoning about whether the feedback fits the characteristic.

Step 5. Below is a table that shows your choices for each example, using both characteristics. Entries with a red double border are ones for which we have a different answer—this doesn't mean you're incorrect, necessarily; it might just mean you're interpreting the example (or the characteristic) differently. You can click on any entry in the table to get an explanation of our thinking. How is it similar to, or different from, your own?

Learning Intention

Understand more than one way to compare ratios.

Success Criteria

  1. Use appropriate ratios for a given situation.
  2. Use multiplication or division to compare ratios.
  3. Explain why more than one way will work.

Lesson Overview

This lesson follows previous work around ratios, but is the first lesson on unit rates.

  1. Independent work: Compare costs for cat food sold at two stores that use different rates for their pricing.
  2. Small groups: Share methods and look for similarities and differences in the methods used.
  3. Full Class: Groups share the similarities and differences.
  4. Summary/closure: Teacher emphasizes the use of multiplication and division, even when methods were different.

Independent Work Task

Two stores are advertising the following:

Kittie Kittles is your kitten's favorite cat food, so you plan to purchase the food from one of the two stores.

Which store has the better price? How do you know?

Independent Work Task

Two stores are advertising the following:

Kittie Kittles is your kitten's favorite cat food, so you plan to purchase the food from one of the two stores.

Which store has the better price? How do you know?

Student Work

Student 1 Student 2
Feedback for Student 1:
Feedback for Student 2:
Feedback for
Student 1
Characteristic 1
Characteristic 2
Feedback for
Student 2
Characteristic 1
Characteristic 2

Content Characteristic 1: Formative feedback references the success criteria, and therefore remains focused on the learning intention for the lesson.

Content Characteristic 2: The feedback describes explicit next steps in the form of a hint, cue, or model that the student can take to move closer to meeting the success criteria.

Does this teacher's feedback fit the characteristic?

Yes
No
I'm unsure
Submit Check

Congratulations, you have provided a response for all examples.

Use the "next" button to see at a glance how your responses for all characteristics match our thinking.