PAUSE: Understandable and Specific - The Golden Slice Part 2

Before giving any feedback, it is helpful to revisit the framework for capacity building (Figure 2). Recognizing that faculty are teaching understandable and specific strategies that must overcome the distance of online education (transactional distance) for discipline-specific writing (pedagogy) to adult learners (andragogy) to support heutagogy (building capacity for academic success) lays the foundation for understandable and specific feedback. Feedback that is understandable and specific provides the exact strategies students need to improve their work moving forward but is also free of jargon that might not be helpful or might become an impediment to understanding and implementing feedback.

Figure 2.

Online learning capacity building continuum

Feedback is a crucial step in the teaching and learning cycle. Feedback helps to close the gap between what the students have submitted and what the desired objectives of the assignment were (Hunt, 2001). When distance is a factor, feedback becomes even more important since face-to-face, immediate feedback is not present. The distance provides space for miscommunication and misunderstanding (Hunt, 2001). Students need feedback to help them reach their identity as potential as persistent learners (Higgins, 1987; Markus & Nurius, 1986; Quinonex & Olivas, 2020). Therefore, when providing feedback, it is important that faculty attend to the specific needs of each student in order to provide understandable and specific feedback. Understandable feedback that is accessible to students is crucial for helping them to identify themselves as the higher education learners that they are (Fernandez-Toro & Hurd, 2014; Quiñonez & Olivas, 2020). Consider the knowledge that students need to improve. Do they need assistance with organization? Are they misunderstanding the content? What APA feedback might they need? Does your feedback to the student need to focus on content? Mechanics? Discipline-specific vocabulary? How can you provide feedback that is understandable and specific so that the students can implement that feedback immediately. This is where becoming an eclectic instructor, as explained in Chapter 2, is helpful.

For some students, providing feedback such as, “Pay closer attention to APA” or “Good job on this” does not point them in the direction of how to specifically acquire or reinforce the knowledge and skills needed to close the gap with APA formatting. Nor does the feedback tell the student what was done well. What is the specific struggle? Is it in-text citations? Quotes? Reference formatting? Once the specific is known, how can it be fixed? Where should the student go to look? If students are required the APA manual as text, point them to the specific page in the book or provide the correct formatting for the student to reference. Offering understandable scaffolding through feedback presents the student with a solution to a knowledge gap that will promote feeling confident and increase motivation to persist (Ryan & Deci, 2000). If the student has done well with a specific skill, highlighting that will continue to build motivation to continue that behavior. We will cover that more in Chapter 9.