Study Island and Descriptive Feedback

Providing descriptive feedback means communicating to students where they are doing well and where they need improvement.

Why Descriptive Feedback? The purpose of descriptive feedback is to provide opportunities for the learner to make adjustments and improvements toward mastery of a specified standard.

Key Implication for Instruction and Assessment:
Students must be given the opportunity to apply the feedback by trying again

Study Island helps students receive descriptive feedback by:
1) Providing detailed explanations for all questions that show not only the answer but also, how to reason and think in order to find the answer; this “provides for opportunities for the learner to make adjustments and improvements toward mastery of a specified standard” and “comes from the activity itself.” Study Island allows students to “receive feedback from the performance itself” then provides “other timely chances to act on the feedback.”

2) Allowing students to go through missed questions at the end of a session and after they have checked out the explanations; this gives students “the opportunity to apply the feedback by trying again.” This unique Study Island feature provides “the attempts and adjustments by the learner to perform that cause accomplishment.”

3) Providing teachers the opportunity to drill down in student assignments to view the questions they missed with the further opportunity to then bring students up individually or in small groups to provide feedback and another chance at answering the questions; this provides the opportunity for teachers “to provide specific and useful information that students need in order to master worthy performances.” Study Island provides reports that yield a prioritized ranking of where each individual student stands in their mastery of the standards for which they will be assessed this year; this precise reporting allows teachers to “provide for individual, targeted, specific feedback to each student” and to provide for differentiated instruction.

4) Keeping students (and teachers) focused on their required standards by posting and linking all question topics directly to GLCEs; this provides students and teachers exact wording to “describe what the learner did and did not do in relation to her goals”; this “is actionable information, and it empowers the student to make intelligent adjustments”.

5) Immediately displaying the student score, both current session and previous sessions on the same topic; and displaying an overall scorecard after each session to provide immediate feedback to let a student determine “what did I do that worked and what did I do that didn’t work and why? Then: how can I improve?” Study Island then provides students the opportunity to do another session on the same topic in order to show improvement.