Elements of Grading. Douglas Reeves

if not applied with the FAST elements. Each of these is a necessary but insufficient condition for improvement. If information is accurate but not timely, it is unlikely to lead to any improvements. An autopsy, for example, is a marvelously accurate piece of diagnostic work, but it never restores the patient to health.

      Almost every teacher I know labors to be fair, excluding any bias regarding gender or ethnicity, in their evaluations of student work, but the pursuit of fairness can impair accuracy. This is particularly true when teachers conflate a student’s attitude and behavior with the quality of his or her work. Many computer programs can provide rapid feedback, but if that feedback only informs students whether their performance is correct or incorrect, they will gain little information about how to improve the thinking process that led to an incorrect response or how to sustain the analyses that led to a correct one. Specificity is a component of effective feedback, but reams of data delivered months after students leave school are as ineffective as the detailed criticisms written on the high school English paper mailed to the student weeks after final grades are assigned.

      Let’s take a closer look at how each of these FAST elements relates to feedback.

Fairness

      My favorite lesson in fairness came from Mr. Freeman French, my junior high school orchestra conductor, who had students audition from behind a curtain. Neither students nor the teacher knew the gender, identity, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status of the player. We could only hear the music. While Mr. French’s commitment to fairness may seem extreme, it represents a commitment to principle that seems elusive in the context of bias that ranges from Olympic skating to World Cup soccer in which, to put it mildly, fairness is not always the primary value on display. Certainly the blind audition approach of Mr. French had its limits—he ultimately had to look at his performers and give them feedback face to face, but the tone of fairness that he set in his classes conveyed the fact, as well as the impression, that our screeching strings—sharp and flat, too fast or too slow—elicited his feedback solely based on our work and not our appearance.