Abstract:

Feedback to students is seen as a key tool for learning. In this sense, this feedback should be provided when the student is capable of making changes, so only final feedback does not use all potential of this tool. Moreover, the more reasoned and broader the feedback is, the more valuable it is.

Furthermore, when students are required to complete a documentation task on a topic, it is not usual to provide feedback systematically. From the idea of articles reviewing system at conferences or journals to which teachers are accustomed, an experience was proposed for last year students of Industrial Engineering Degree. The experience is easy, since students should make a documentation task about a specific topic assigned by the teacher. However, for the last years, they should generate two deliverables: a first preliminary version and, after receiving comments, another final one. The comments referred to the format and presentation, organization, content and other general aspects. Both versions were considered for the assessment of the task. It was observed, as expected, that the quality of work improved in comparison with academic years in which no feedback was carried out.

In the academic year 2011-12, the feedback system was modified, so that each student task, in stead of being supervised by the teacher, was supervised by two students who performed independently comments on the work of another student, while their works were reviewed by others. In this case, students receive general indications of the aspects to be evaluated. It was observed that students were not able to deepen and detect all the shortcomings of the work of their peers, resulting in a very poor feedback and the quality of the final work was not significantly improved compared to the provisional versions.

Finally, in the academic year 2012-13, we continued with the feedback from the students, but in this case, we provided a detailed rubric to evaluate aspects. Additionally, they were allowed to include general comments on aspects to be improved. In this case, the feedback provided by the students improved significantly and served the students to improve quality of their work from the comments received. Furthermore, it is considered, although it is difficult to assess, that students can improve their own work as they act as systematic reviewers, as this activity allows them to learn in which aspects they should focus their attention and they do not just learn from mistakes they have committed in their tasks, but errors in other works. Finally, we analyzed the correlation between the quality of the work and the quality evaluations and quality between before and after feedback depending on the quality of this feedback.

Keywords:

Feedback, documentaion, improvement, rubric.