The Math Feedback Project

The Benefits

The Math Feedback Project personalizes Math 340 to a student’s level and learning orientation, allowing for a greater sense of agency. The process leaves students with less stress, more ownership, and clear goals framed around where students want to improve. The approach utilizes a process of reflection on why problems were correct or incorrect and opportunities to retake problems after processing mistakes or successes.

The Challenges

Some students, usually those who are high performing, prefer not to reflect on their test problems, wanting instead to take a test and get a grade. However, this preference often dissipates throughout a course utilizing Feedback First as students begin to experience how the process relieves stress and incorporates individual agency.

Takeaways & Best Practices

Students report they are more confident when asking questions because problems they get wrong on tests can be redone. Students no longer worry that a single wrong answer will ruin their grade.

Feedback First encourages a disciplined variety of assessment. By teaching students as individuals rather than molding them to a teacher’s standard, students understand what competencies they need to be successful in their learning journey.

Process skills are invaluable to 21^st-century teaching and learning. If education is to lead young people into a workforce characterized by rapidly changing competencies, they must be able to understand their individual learning process and apply it to a variety of content and concepts.

Bottom Line

The Math Feedback Project helps students identify topics of growth on their own, enriches students with a sense of agency over their learning, and reduces stress related to grades.