Enhancing feedback provision and use to promote learning through assessment

Assessment reforms in higher education recognise the need for effective feedback that is timely, informative, and encourages positive attitudes towards future learning. Although it is well established that feedback has large positive impacts on learning, evaluating the actual extent to which students engage with and utilise feedback is difficult. Studies show that feedback is often too brief, too broadly stated, and is often misinterpreted by students. Recent studies suggest that students find audio feedback more engaging and informative, and prefer either audio or a combination of text and audio to text alone. We recently developed a ‘multi-modal’ marking system, to aid provision of timely, detailed and situated feedback, and to investigate new methods of feedback provision. The system can support large cohorts of students and markers, and provides learning analytics during the feedback process. To date, the system has been trialled on 852 student assignments in two separate trials, the first based on a final student laboratory report, and the second on a draft of a scientific literature review. Preliminary analysis indicates extensive provision and use of the in-situ feedback. However, it also revealed differences in the ways markers use the modalities, and differences in student use of feedback, particularly relating to time spent, suggesting there was an effect of timeliness of feedback provision. For audio feedback specifically, students reported in interviews that they favoured in-situ audio feedback for its greater detail and personalised nature Together, these findings may be used to enhance the provision of quality feedback.