Working Smart with Corrective Feedback

 (Originally titled “Making TIME for Feedback”)

From the Marshall Memo #452

In this Educational Leadership article, San Diego State University professors Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey have these helpful suggestions on giving feedback to students:

• Focus on errors rather than mistakes. Mistakes are basically goofs, say Fisher and Frey – doing something wrong due to inattention or fatigue. Once a mistake is pointed out, we usually recognize it and know what to do to correct it. It’s easy for teachers to recognize their students’ mistakes if they’re familiar with previous work and can see what’s uncharacteristic. Errors, on the other hand, stem from not knowing something or not knowing what to do. Teachers should focus on teaching students how to correct their factual errors, procedural errors, transformational errors (incorrectly applying information to a new situation), and errors due to misconceptions. 

• Identify patterns in students’ errors. A lot of the written feedback that teachers give students is wasted, say Fisher and Frey. Students either toss the papers out or comply with the comments in a narrow way, with little long-term transfer. It’s much more productive for teachers to look for patterns and record them in a systematic way (What were the most common errors and who was making them?) and then follow up with corrective instruction. “Analyzing student performance in this way enables teachers to be much more precise in addressing errors and to organize data in such a way that they don’t have to keep looking through student work to determine who needs additional help,” they say. 

• Distinguish between global and targeted errors and teach accordingly. If 80 percent of the students in a class failed to provide supportive evidence in their history essays, that skill needs to be retaught to the entire class. But if only three or four students had that problem, the teacher needs to pull aside only those students for follow-up. 

• Use prompts and cues. It’s not a good sign when teachers have to remind students again and again to correct something – for example, to cite sources in research papers. Fisher and Frey recommend giving students prompts and cues to guide their thinking and make them independent of constant adult help. “When students learn how to think about their mistakes and errors,” they say, “it not only saves time but also prevents students from developing learned helplessness, a condition in which students depend on adults for the ‘right’ information.” 

“Making TIME for Feedback” by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey in Educational Leadership, September 2012 (Vol. 70, #1, p. 42-47), www.ascd.org; the authors can be reached at

dfisher@mail.sdsu.edu and nfrey@mail.sdsu.edu.