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Descriptive Feedback Examples

Example 1:

Critical Challenge: A Poetic Picture (Grade 2)
Specific Outcome: 2.1.1.1
Students will appreciate how a community’s physical geography shapes identity.
Example Teacher Comment: What powerful words you have used to describe the community! Your words create pictures in the mind of your reader and show what is important to the people who live in this community.

Example 2:

Critical Challenge: Stories of Alberta’s Past (Grade 4)
Specific Outcome: 4.2.1.2
Students will recognize oral traditions, narratives and stories as valid sources of knowledge about the land, culture and history.
Example Teacher Comment: What a wonderful story of your grandparent’s journey to Canada! Now you need to identify what we can learn from their story about the land, culture and history. Select a graphic organizer to organize and share this information. You might be surprised to see how much good information is in their story!

Example 3:

Critical Challenge: Exploring Personal Worldviews (Grade 8)
Specific Outcomes: 8.1.4
Students will appreciate how a society’s worldview shapes individual citizenship and identity.
8.1.4
Students will re-evaluate personal opinions to broaden understanding of a topic or an issue.
Example Teacher Comment: The comparison of your responses from your first Personal Worldview questionnaire to your second identifies where your responses changed. Now go back and think about why you changed your response. What caused you to rethink your ideas? Record this new information.

About Commentaries:
Descriptive feedback provides feedback to a student that is descriptive and specifically related to the learner outcomes. It highlights what has been done well and prompts further thought. Through comments and questions it models the use of the language of the outcomes and if used in assessment for learning, provides opportunities for students to improve their work.

Descriptive feedback is best used in the absence of letter grades or percentages. When students receive both a numerical grade and descriptive feedback, they tend to focus on the grade and the benefit of the descriptive feedback is lost (Butler). Descriptive feedback is an effective way to provide feedback to students relative to the Values and Attitudes outcomes where a letter or numerical grade might not be appropriate.
Last updated: December 15, 2008 | (Revision History)
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