1. State of the art. Discussion and future lines of research on effective individualized feedback in online environments
Dolors Plana1, Soledad Moya2, Pep Simo3
1 Department of Economics and Business, Open University of Catalonia (UOC)
2Finance and Management Control Department, EADA Business School
3Department of Management, Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC)
Objective
The aim of this paper is to analyze the state the art of effective individualized feedback as a necessary and indispensable tool of the formative assessment process. Our analysis focuses on the environment of online higher education
Theoretical Framework
Change the role of students and professors: Active and responsible attitude from students towards their learning process, the professor must give advice and follow the student progress (Pozo, Pérez, Mateos, Martin, & de la Cruz, 2006)
Change planning, methodology and assessment of teaching and learning process (Zarraga, Jaca & Viles, 2012)
Assessment …….
How?
What?
One of the key elements in an assessment system that orients learning: Feedback (Gibbs & Simpson, 2004; Hounsell, 2003)
Change the paradigm
Education focused on teaching
Education focused on learning
Continuous & formative
Summative
Move to +
During the process
Al the end of the process
Student is the center of the learning process and teaching should promote beneficial and fruitful learning throughout long-life
Knowledge + skills and attitudes
The role of feedback in learning
Why? Because It is the process that students use to facilitate their own learning (Bound & Molloy, 2012)
Thus the Feedback delivery needs to:
Encourage dialogue between giver and receiver feedback (versus monologue)
Involve peers (versus not peers)
Explicitly encourage self-regulation and engagement of students (versus not explicitly encourage)
Feedback on assignment process (versus product)
Students encouraged to be proactive in working with feedback (versus reactive)
(adapted to Orsmond, Maw, Park, Gómez & Crook, 2011)
How to do it?
Nicol & Macfarlene-Dick (2006) develop a model of formative feedback where self-regulation of learning is supported in the seven principles of good practice of feedback.
And a key factor will be:
Engagement of students with the feedback (Price, Hadley & Millar, 2011)
Technical aspects of effective feedback
Discussion and conclusions
Providing effective feedback to students and having it used by them is essential to support and enhance their learning experience in higher education.
With limited resources for higher education professors and institutions, we must deepen in: how do we do more effective feedback considering scarce resources?
The student preferences for individualized feedback together with an assessment by the professor in an online environment, lead us to focus on: how do digital tools reduce the professor workload?
The important role and responsibility given to students in the learning process does question whether students and teachers have the information, knowledge and skills needed to participate fully and effectively in this process. So we should find out if, do teachers share the vision of an education system increasingly focused on putting the student at the center of the learning process?
Other relevant research questions from students perspective would be: What are the determinants of student engagement with the individualized feedback received? or what is the role of technology (text, video, audio)?
Conclusions: We should be able to identify those aspects of professors, students and technological tools conducive to individualized feedback training to be effective in an online environment and in a context of limited resources.
Is not easy to know what kind of feedback is useful. There are a lot of factors that explain cause and effect relations
Implementation of feedback across barriers from professors: pressure of time and the belief that students are only interested in their grades
And from students: they do not understand feedback, do not know specifically what to improve or have received the comment too late to be useful
Feedback in an online environment
Potential of virtual feedback does not differ from f2f feedback
Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick’s principles are also critical in the process of online formative assessment (Gikandi, Morrow & Davis, 2011)
Distinguishing Features:
Basics: clear feedback, timely, continuous and sufficient detail (Wolsey, 2008)
Should significantly stimulate dialogue pupil / teacher / student. Interaction tools are critical
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