Giving Kids Feedback

Some really interesting stuff....I'm at a conference right now and today I attended a workshop by Robert Marzano (you know, the "What Works in Schools" guy, etc). The workshop was on assessment and grading in a standards-based educational system; very fascinating. One of the things Marzano talked about was the impact of the different types of feedback on student student achievement. According to him, and all of the research, simple tests, where we just count items right or wrong that we administer, grade, and then hand back out to students actually have a NEGATIVE impact on student achivement.

We can improve on that slightly by just giving kids the right answer when we hand their work back to them. When students have knowledge of the scoring criteria BEFORE the assignment, the achievement goes up by almost 16 percentile points. The way I interpreted this was to go over the rubric that you'll be using to score a student's work, before they actually start the writing (or project).
You can increase the impact of this behavior (knowledge of criteria) even further when it's coupled with explanations of why a particular problem (or area) was right or wrong. Again, let's put that in the context of writing. What Marzano is saying is effective is to review the rubric first with the students, let them write, and then, after you have scored their writing, provide them with feedback on what they did well and what they needed to improve upon, based upon the language of the rubric (sounds like a writing conference to me. How about you!?) And finally, the one factor that has the most impact on student achievement.....graphing results....with the students; empowering them to monitor their own learning. Makes a ton of sense to me, how about you. What do you think of Marzano's work? Woudl it work for every subject?