Media-Enhanced Feedback - An Easily Effective and Affective Option for Learning

 

Tested Studies in Laboratory Teaching, 2018, Volume 39

Alp Oran

Abstract

For the student, high quality and timely feedback from the course assessment tools has an important impact on student engagement and can affect their ability to learn (Crook, Mauchline, Maw, Lawson, Drinkwater, Lundqvist, Orsmond, Gomez, & Park, 2012). Unfortunately, despite a broad awareness by educators of its effects on and for learning, less effective assessment practices persist to the detriment of the learning environment. A digital audio/video approach to feedback and assessment, also referred to as media- enhanced (ME), offers the educator the option of sharing constructive criticism in an emotionally supportive framework, a difference that may be difficult or too time-consuming to communicate in traditional text-based formats. This affective component to assessment may be the difference between engagement and disengagement from the course curriculum. I decided to introduce a media-enhanced assessment component in three different undergraduate science courses offered during the 2015-16 and 2016-17 school years at the University of Ottawa. After the semesters were completed, I engaged in a collective case study analysis (with elements based on Grounded Theory) that addressed the following research question: "What are the perceived advantages and disadvantages with ME assessment?" The study used a social constructivist interpretative framework in which I co-created with the help of my student interviewees a plausible 3-phase model that described what transpired when students experienced ME feedback and how it compared to their historical feedback experiences. Conference attendees will learn how undergraduate science students respond to assessment as well as learn how ME-feedback positions itself within this framework, offering convenient and arguably more appropriate opportunities (of assessment) for learning than other traditional forms of assessment.

Keywords:  assessment, providing feedback, student assessment, audio-video feedback

University of Wisconsin, Madison (2017)