Formative Assessment

3 Ways to Encourage ‘Coasting’ Students to Reach Their Full Potential

Students who are doing well—but could be doing much better—benefit from feedback that encourages self-monitoring.

December 21, 2021

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There are a number of students who are commonly found to be in the place of high proficiency in their learning but demonstrate low growth in terms of their progress. They meet deadlines, support others in their work, and take the lead on projects, but their busyness doesn’t always yield the growth one would or should expect for these children.

Such students require instruction that is, in many ways, different from the approach when learners are working to reach the basic facts and skills of a subject. Interestingly, students who are typically in the situation of high achievement/low growth don’t require a separate class or shift in grade level. Moreover, they don’t need more of the same—more homework and reinforcing their understanding by helping others.

What these students need are subtle shifts in tasks, instruction, and feedback. One of the best ways to start making the impact we desire for students when they are cruising along the high-achieving/low-growth phase of learning is to differentiate our feedback.

While feedback for emerging learners is found to be best when it’s corrective and prescriptive, these approaches are less than ideal for students as they gain proficiency. Often, the feedback that people who have gained proficiency but show low growth need is designed to focus on self-monitoring performance, making and reflecting upon self-correction, and receiving feedback on how to take proactive steps for future challenges. They need feedback by approximation, not precision.

3 Strategies to Support Coasting Students

Strategy 1 Nudge. Provide just enough feedback for students to self-monitor and take action in their learning. As students gain proficiency, they need less direct feedback related to their performance on a task and more feedback tied to their own ability to detect errors, monitor their performance, and find ways to take initiative on their own learning.

The following daily teacher actions help nudge students toward those dispositions.

Strategy 2: Establish social norms. Ensure that collaborative agreements and processes are in place so that peer-to-peer feedback is accurate and helpful in students’ deciding next steps. With feedback, we need to shift away from the gradual release of responsibility to center on the need to cultivate the mutual responsibility of learning. Instead of shifting from teacher-centric feedback (“I do”) to student-centric feedback (“you do”), we need to focus on the learning-centered environment (“we do”).

One way to start this work is by refining peer-to-peer feedback. Graham Nuthall’s research has shown that students often receive and use feedback from their friends. Interestingly, he found that most peer feedback is inaccurate. To rectify this, we need to prepare students to give and receive accurate feedback.

We can support students by engaging in the following actions.

Strategy 3: Highlight nuance. Focus on range and/or subtle shifts in feedback to promote self-direction and prime creativity.

When the criteria are opened, students see that work can always be improved. This is also an opportunity to ask students what they can do in the future to be proactive in going beyond the requirements of a task.

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Filed Under

  • Formative Assessment
  • Student Engagement
  • 3-5 Upper Elementary
  • 6-8 Middle School
  • 9-12 High School

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