Less stress, more success: Leveraging frequent, low-stakes assessments for meaningful feedback
Session Type
Presentation
Room
Physics and Astronomy, room 106
Start Date
16-7-2025 4:00 PM
End Date
16-7-2025 4:30 PM
Keywords
Feedback, low-stakes assessments, formative assessment, student engagement, continuous learning
Primary Threads
Teaching and Learning Science
Abstract
Formative feedback is essential to education as it influences students’ self-confidence and continuously enhances their learning. Frequent, low-stakes assessments (FLSAs) offer regular opportunities for students to engage with formative feedback by prioritizing learning over grades. These assessments create supportive learning environments by providing students with consistent, actionable strategies that encourage deeper engagement, promote self-directed learning habits, and reduce performance anxiety.
However, despite instructors’ best efforts to provide feedback, students often seek more detailed or applicable feedback, highlighting a gap that can limit their learning potential. This presentation addresses this gap by exploring undergraduate students’ perceptions and applications of feedback received from FLSAs within biological sciences courses. The research methodology includes analysis of course outlines and an ethics-approved student survey focusing on feedback engagement and usefulness. This research categorizes feedback based on its formative value, specifically the detail and practical application provided for future learning.
Findings demonstrate how formative feedback from FLSAs influences students’ learning processes and decision-making, as well as the impact this feedback can have on students’ confidence and motivation. Additionally, this presentation will provide evidence-based recommendations for optimizing feedback delivery, with the intent to maximize educational impact without substantially increasing instructors’ or students’ workload. By introducing these recommendations and methodology, participants will leave with actionable insights designed to enhance teaching practices, directly contributing to student success and instructor sustainability. Bring your own device (smartphone, laptop, or tablet) to actively engage with the presentation, as well as share and discuss FLSA feedback experiences with other attendees throughout the session!
Elements of Engagement
This session actively engages participants by incorporating interactive polls and discussions through Menti, allowing attendees to reflect on and share their own experiences with feedback practices while integrating results and research questions into the discussion. Participants will collaboratively generate and discuss specific teaching scenarios, identifying effective feedback strategies applicable to their unique contexts. Digital resources summarizing key strategies and recommendations will be provided, including worksheets with space for additional insights gathered during the session, available to attendees both during and after the presentation.
Less stress, more success: Leveraging frequent, low-stakes assessments for meaningful feedback
Physics and Astronomy, room 106
Formative feedback is essential to education as it influences students’ self-confidence and continuously enhances their learning. Frequent, low-stakes assessments (FLSAs) offer regular opportunities for students to engage with formative feedback by prioritizing learning over grades. These assessments create supportive learning environments by providing students with consistent, actionable strategies that encourage deeper engagement, promote self-directed learning habits, and reduce performance anxiety.
However, despite instructors’ best efforts to provide feedback, students often seek more detailed or applicable feedback, highlighting a gap that can limit their learning potential. This presentation addresses this gap by exploring undergraduate students’ perceptions and applications of feedback received from FLSAs within biological sciences courses. The research methodology includes analysis of course outlines and an ethics-approved student survey focusing on feedback engagement and usefulness. This research categorizes feedback based on its formative value, specifically the detail and practical application provided for future learning.
Findings demonstrate how formative feedback from FLSAs influences students’ learning processes and decision-making, as well as the impact this feedback can have on students’ confidence and motivation. Additionally, this presentation will provide evidence-based recommendations for optimizing feedback delivery, with the intent to maximize educational impact without substantially increasing instructors’ or students’ workload. By introducing these recommendations and methodology, participants will leave with actionable insights designed to enhance teaching practices, directly contributing to student success and instructor sustainability. Bring your own device (smartphone, laptop, or tablet) to actively engage with the presentation, as well as share and discuss FLSA feedback experiences with other attendees throughout the session!