Evaluations and Feedback
For many, the evaluations encourage readers to continue practicing and learning because when people receive thoughtful evaluations, they feel heard and become motivated to improve. Delivering an evaluation is an excellent way to practice and demonstrate our suggestions to readers. As good evaluators, we give helpful feedback to others. We take the time to work on topics and to assess the contents. Actually, the evaluators really play an influential role to provide constructive and positive comments to readers. The key to presenting a high-value evaluation is not just observing areas for improvement, but also offering specific and feasible recommendations for how readers can improve in the future. For the readers, evaluations are like formal observation, while the share personalized, detailed feedback is a way in a private follow-up conversation with the readers. Feedback plays a crucial role, too, with valuable insights for building upon readers’ strengths and improvement. Additionally, feedback fosters a supportive and encouraging environment, where readers feel empowered to take risks, and push themselves out of their comfort zones in non-public areas.
In fact, teachers and students are both readers, responding authentically to the texts. Teachers always give students specific advice about what to keep on doing and what to work on doing in future pieces. Students also share their works with one another all the time through mutual discussions. Furthermore, teachers and students are both evaluators, offering sincere feedback to the pieces. For the public speaking, the effective feedback is as follows:
Keep on choosing topics and developing them deeply
Keep on using strong imagination to create good stories
Work on organizing the ideas into smooth and logical paragraphs
Work on proofreading carefully, especially for missing keywords
As evaluators, teachers can list the specific, accurate and clear guidance to students, while students would also pinpoint precise strengths and weaknesses among peers in the public speaking. Such a well-constructed feedback is very helpful, especially, in the classrooms. In large group classes, whatsoever, students sometimes get frustrated doing evaluation activities with other students. For these situations, feedback from teachers and peers can help students appreciate the value of their tasks, and improve their confidence, accuracy and fluency. Feedback is not only about error correction, but also about finding out the main topics, giving and exchanging opinions and developing ideas. What’s more, it’s a good idea that students make their own notes from any feedback. Thus, students can recognize their own typical errors and correct them at once.
Except for the public speaking, essentially, asking for feedback at any stage of the writing also helps students a lot in the understanding of their writing. By seeking feedback from others, students are taking positive, constructive steps to improve their own writing and develop as writers. However, occasionally, students might worry that the feedback will be negative. We know that many people avoid asking others what they think because they have a sneaking (卑怯的) suspicion that the news will not be good. Nevertheless, if we want to improve our writing, constructive criticism from others, definitely, helps. In order to become efficient evaluators, we must share our writing often with a variety of readers. When we ask someone, “Could you take a look at my writing?” or “Could you tell me if this is OK?” can sometimes elicit wonderfully rich responses. Besides, we do need to ask different persons for feedback at different stages in the writing process. For example, the effective feedback might be as follows:
The Beginning Introduction: Do I understand the writing? Am I gathering the right kinds of information to answer this question? Are my strategies for approaching this writing effective? How can I discover the best way to develop my early ideas into a feasible draft?
Outline: I have an idea about what I want to argue, but I’m not sure if it is an appropriate or complete response to this writing. Is the way I’m planning to organize my ideas working? Does it look like I’m covering all the points? Do I have a clear main idea? Do I know what I want to say to the reader?
The First Draft: Does my writing make sense, and is it interesting? Have I proven my thesis statement? Is the evidence I’m using convincing? Is it explained clearly? Have I given the reader enough information? Is the information in the right order? What can I say in my introduction and conclusion?
The Second Draft: Are the transitions between my ideas smooth and effective? Do my sentences make sense individually? How’s my writing style?
The Final Draft: Are there any noticeable spelling or grammar errors? Are my margins and formatting OK? Is the writing effective? Is there anything I should change at the last minute?
In addition, a notebook on asking for feedback after a writing has been double-checked by students. More importantly, taking the time to read, at least twice, throughout the evaluations and feedback is necessary, for sure.
At last, feedback is essential in personalized learning. Personalized learning to education, in our country, is an excellent approach to education for students’ abilities, learning styles, interests, and preferences. In other words, personalized learning is an effective way of promoting students’ engagement, motivation, and achievement in school. However, personalized learning can only be useful if it includes timely, meaningful, and relevant feedback. Feedback is really a critical component of personalized learning that helps students monitor their progress, identify their strengths and weaknesses, set goals, and adjust their learning strategies. We can say that evaluations are the information provided to students about their performance, progress, and goals. On the contrary, feedback can be informal, verbal or written, immediate or delayed, but could be provided by various sources, such as teachers, peers and parents. The key characteristic of feedback is that it is specific, constructive, and actionable. Feedback is not praise or criticism, but rather an opportunity for improvement and growth. Feedback, actually, is great in personalized learning for several reasons: 1. Feedback helps students monitor their progress. 2. Feedback provides students with information about what they have learned, what they still need to learn, and how to improve their performance. 3. Feedback allows students to see the relevance of their learning and potential to achieve the goals. Positive feedback, indeed, boost students’ confidence, self-efficacy and persistence, too. By the way, feedback further encourages teachers to evaluate the effectiveness of their instruction and make necessary adjustments. All in all, personalized learning with feedback can promote higher-order thinking skills, such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity among teachers and students. These skills are necessary for lifelong learning and success in the twenty-first century. Therefore, the importance of evaluations and feedback cannot be overemphasized in our actual classrooms.