Supporting Student Learning in Scientific Inquiry: The Potential of Teachers' Written Feedback

The feedback that teachers give to students is a central aspect of formative assessment. This study focused on teachers’ written feedback. More specifically, on written feedback that is scaffolded by two different types of feedback templates: rubrics and more open-ended comment templates. The use of teachers’ written feedback in the classroom was explored by analysing respective cases from Germany (chemistry, lower and upper secondary school), Switzerland (integrated science, primary school; biology and physics, upper
secondary school) and Denmark (integrated science, biology, and technology, lower and upper secondary school). All the cases took place in the context of scientific inquiry and the respective written feedback focused on investigation competences such as planning and conducting experiments. Based on the teachers’ written feedback and students’ artefacts, the extent to which the two types of feedback templates help teachers to provide feedback was analysed. Furthermore, data from teacher questionnaires with open items was used to examine the potential but also the difficulties teachers have in using written feedback. The results could help to shape means of support for an implementation of written feedback as part of formative assessment in science education but also to identify areas where further research on written feedback is needed.