TOEFL Speaking Task 4 Practice Test #29

Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in an education class.

Professor: So, part of what teachers do is offer their students feedback or comments on their work or performance. They praise them when they do something right or let them know if they’re doing something wrong. This feedback helps students improve their work in the future. Effective feedback, feedback that’s more likely to help students improve, has certain characteristics. Let’s talk about two characteristics of effective feedback. One characteristic of effective feedback is that it’s properly timed. Feedback should be given when students are still working on a particular task or skill and have opportunities to apply the feedback, to practice the teacher’s suggestion on a similar assignment. For example, if there’s an art teacher whose students have been working on paintings for an assignment, she should give them feedback on these paintings while the class is still studying painting. So, the students can actually try the painting techniques the teacher recommends.

Another characteristic of effective feedback is that it focuses on students’ work, and not on the students themselves. When a teacher criticizes students, they might feel bad about themselves, but they won’t necessarily know what to do differently. But when feedback focuses on students’ work, they learn what to do in the future. For example, to go back to the art teacher, let’s say one of her students does a painting, and the teacher thinks the colors in the painting don’t look good. Instead of telling the student he’s a bad painter, the teacher might suggest different colors to use in the next painting.