Easily Give Assignment Feedback

Getting Started

With this guide, you can learn to quickly write a comment bank that will help you create specific, individualized feedback for an assignment or assessment. Before you begin, you will need to know what assignment or assessment you want to give feedback for, as well as the specific outcomes of that assignment.

For this guide, let's say I'm giving feedback on an oral presentation that students are completing in class.

Step 1: Determine Outcomes

Start by creating a new comment bank. Not sure how to do that? Find out here. When starting a new comment bank you have a place to write the outcomes that your comment bank is targeting. While not required, knowing what your students should be able to do at the end of an assignment is important.

Step 2: List What a Perfect Assignment Would Have

Your next step is to take those outcomes and ask yourself "What would a student who did this perfectly do?" Create a list. To make writing the comment bank easier, write each item starting with a verb written in present participle (a verb ending in -ing.)

For my oral presentation, I want my students to be able to do all these things to "master" the assignment:

1. Speaking with a clear voice
2. Using an appropriate volume level, ensuring that everyone could hear them
3. Presenting at an appropriate pace - not speaking too quickly or slowly
4. Looking at their audience throughout the presentation
5. Using their slideshow to enhance their presentation
6. Being ready for their presentation
7. Speaking confidently

Keep this list handy as we will use it when creating our comment.

Step 3: Determine What Levels You Want

We are going to sort the above items into various levels of achievement. You need to ask yourself how many levels you want. Two? Three? Let's say I am going to use three levels for this assignment. I want to indicate when students demonstrated strengths, when they showed a developing skill, and when they still need to work on something.

Step 4: Create a Parallel List

Parallel Lists are a quick way to write a comment bank once you learn how to use them. For this, the comments are going to be the same for each level of quality. We need to write our levels so that our comments, starting with a present participle verb make sense following them.

I'm going to use these headings for my levels:

1. Student's Name demonstrated strengths in:
2. Student's Name is developing their abilities in:
3. Student's Name next steps for learning are:

To enter this into my comment bank, I will need to create a list comment. I gave the list comment the title of "Feedback," but you can use whatever you like. I then entered the following into the comment:

Note for making a parallel list I started with my three levels, and then I copied in the items I wanted to give feedback on.

This comment will look like this on The Comment Generator:

Step 5: Generate Reports

And with that, we are now ready to start our reporting. As the student presents, I just need to click on the appropriate level of achievement, and then click "Generate Report" when they finish.

Try it Yourself

Save time giving feedback on your next assignment by creating a comment bank such as this one.

Try This Comment Bank

You can try generating comments with this comment bank or make a copy of it to modify for your own needs.

Parallel List Template

Using parallel lists is an easy way to make a comment bank remembering how to enter them can be difficult. That's why we've made a template for you. Create a new list comment, and then click button. Next, select either the "Strengths/Next Steps Parallel" or "Strengths/Developing/Next Steps Parallel" options.