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

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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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 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 next characteristic. Or, you may switch to another characteristic and look at the same feedback using the new characteristic. Use the tabs to switch among 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 all three 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?