More Practice, Better Feedback: Supporting Student Learning with Technology

How Canvas Quizzes and Poll Everywhere can help students learn more effectively, while keeping things efficient and scalable for you.

By Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning

Why Practice and Feedback Matter

Students learn best when they have multiple opportunities to practice and receive timely, actionable feedback. Frequent, low-stakes practice improves confidence and retention, while immediate feedback prevents misconceptions from taking root. Research consistently shows that formative assessment and feedback are among the most powerful influences on learning (Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006). Plus, multiple opportunities to learn through practice and feedback directly supports USask Assessment Principle #3.

Here are two practical and scalable ways to make this happen using learning technologies you already have access to.

Canvas New Quizzes: Low- or No-Stakes Practice with Automated Feedback

Canvas New Quizzes make it easy to provide students with repeated practice opportunities. By setting up quizzes as low- or no-stakes, students can focus on learning rather than grades. Allowing multiple attempts encourages mastery and reduces anxiety.

The real power of New Quizzes for feedback comes from automated feedback, which is available for all question types, but is most applicable to auto-graded questions, such as Multiple Choice.

For these questions, you can add feedback in two ways:

  1. General feedback for correct and incorrect answers (e.g., “Incorrect! Please review page 96 in our textbook.”).
  2. Specific feedback for each answer option, explaining why it is right or wrong. For example, if a student selects an incorrect option, the feedback might say: “This answer overlooks the role of variable X in the equation.”

Creating this feedback may seem overwhelming. Consider leveraging GenAI, such as Copilot, to help generate the automated feedback statements. Copilot can turn a potentially large task into something more manageable.

When you allow multiple attempts, consider shuffling questions and pulling questions from Item Banks so students see different questions each time. This keeps practice fresh and exposes students to a wider range of examples.

Adding feedback in Canvas is straightforward and students can review it immediately after submission, helping them learn from mistakes without waiting for instructor grading.

Poll Everywhere: Real-Time Feedback During Class

Poll Everywhere offers a way to provide practice and feedback right in the classroom. By posing questions during lectures, students can respond on their devices. Results display instantly, giving you a snapshot of class understanding.

The key benefit of this approach is immediacy as you can address misconceptions on the spot, before they become entrenched. For example, after showing the poll results, you might say: “Most of you chose option B, but let’s revisit why option A is correct.” This quick intervention helps students recalibrate their thinking and reinforces correct reasoning.

Poll Everywhere works well for large classes where individual feedback is hard to provide. It also promotes active learning and metacognition (i.e., thinking about their thinking), as students compare their reasoning to peers and instructor explanations.

Conclusion

Providing structured practice with feedback, through tools like Canvas New Quizzes or Poll Everywhere, helps students build confidence, reduce errors, and stay engaged. These strategies not only allow learners to check their understanding and learn from mistakes in real time, but they also scale easily for any class size, making them a highly recommended component of effective teaching.

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References and Resources

  • GMCTL Support – Contact gmctl@usask.ca for consultation and workshop opportunities.
Title image credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
This article was created with the assistance of AI tools, as described in the GMCTL AI Disclosure Statement.
This resource is shared by the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL), University of Saskatchewan, under a CC BY-NC-SA license.