In any learning experience, learners must receive feedback in order to address misconceptions, adjust understanding, and make progress towards a learning goal. Teachers know this fact, yet many constraints make the feedback process difficult. For one, delivering meaningful and personalized feedback is time-intensive; teachers often spend their weekends working on feedback only to find that their students no longer care. Secondly, existing classroom tools focusing on feedback tend to elicit surface-level knowledge, such as what students can recognize or recall, meaning that teachers do not receive the needed insight into what their students can do with knowledge. In this sense, the feedback challenge is also a formative assessment issue, as it is the daily cycle of feedback that teachers and students struggle with the most. Teachers need better methods of capturing deep student comprehension in order to make teaching adjustments, and students need immediate, personalized feedback to move their learning forward.
Our solution, Short Answer, meets this need in middle and high school classrooms by leveraging peer feedback and comparative judgment. Students construct answers, compare peer responses, and provide feedback. The comparative judgment process serves as a jumping off point for rich class discussion, enabling students to become stronger self-evaluators and deepen their understanding of material, while teachers receive the insight they need on their students’ comprehension. Initial learner studies indicate that teachers see the value of peer feedback in their formative assessment practice, and early feedback lays the groundwork for improving the student learning experience.