Abstract:

Assessment and feedback are key elements in the student learning development within and beyond formal education settings. Although many institutions have adopted technology enhanced assessment and feedback, students’ dissatisfaction with their feedback remains.

An initial fact finding study at a Scottish university showed that students’ lack of engagement with their feedback, their focus on their grades, and the lack of knowledge of whether students access to feedback, had an enormous impact on lecturers’ own engagement and motivation. Furthermore, Turnitin and GradeMarks, used to give students their assignment results, do not have a feature that enables students to leave comments on their own feedback and from any device.

This paper presents the results of a pilot study using some of the features on MyFeedBack, a prototype mobile web 2.0 application for assessment and feedback. These features allow students to leave feedback comments on their feedback and enable monitoring students’ engagement with their feedback. The educator can upload students’ individual or group results for formative or summative assignments.

Students (n=197) were given an extensive feedback on their group assignment on MyFeedBack. The same results were uploaded on the institution VLE, however, with no feedback. The results have shown a higher level of engagement and communication between students and their tutor, which have encouraged the participant lecturer to use that application for another module and share practices with other teaching staff. Furthermore, students who accessed their results on MyFeedBack showed a higher level of engagement with their feedback. However, it was also observed that many students (n=86) chose to access their results on the VLE and view their grade and marks only.

Although limited, these results have implications for both educators and stakeholders trying to get a greater understanding of students’ behaviour in relation to their feedback using technology.
The findings showed that MyFeedBack application can help the educators and stakeholder collect and process the relevant data to answer many questions related to student engagement with their feedback including ‘Do they collect it?’, ‘ Do they read it?’, ‘Will they take it on board?’ and ‘How do they feel about it?’.

Keywords:

Feedback, mobile learning, mobile web application, student engagement, motivation, technology, communication.