Feed Forward and Authentic Assessment

We must give more attention to the interplay between the science of teaching – pedagogy – and the art of teaching… A teacher must be anchored in pedagogy and blend imagination, creativity and inspiration into the teaching learning process to ignite a passion for learning in student. 

– Peyton Williams

        As an educator, it is important to invest meaningful, constructive feedback to students. Two standard methods of feedback used are feed forward and authentic assessment. The main idea of feed forward is for the educator to give students the steps to take to improve their work. This type of feedback helps the student to refrain from dwelling on their past mistakes but moving forward in how to make changes for the future. Another form used in teaching is an authentic assessment. Authentic assessment is used to help students apply real life situation into their learning. For example debriefing helps students correlate their content they learned in class and assess how they can apply it in to real-life situations. After the scenario, students debrief and review what they did well and what they could have done better.

        It is common for educators to recognize the student’s mistakes and providing feedback on what was wrong, without helping the student move forward. This type of feedback is negatively identified by the student and is not as efficient as an authentic assessment approach by faculty. In my career as an educator, I plan to give students timely feedback that will help them to learn what is needed to provide the best understanding of a topic. It is important to give students time to meet with their instructor to discuss any further clarification and needs to promote critical thinking skills and understand how they can move forward and prevent the same mistakes. It is important to provide an authentic assessment into teaching and the feedback given to students. This approach will help students to think critically and understand how to apply the content they learned. The feedforward and authentic assessment are more time consuming for the educator, but these forms of assessment are needed to help students grow and strengthen their thinking and hands-on skills as they prepare for the nursing field.