Abstract:

In contemporary university didactics the function of feedback changes, as from a simple exchange of questions and answers between professors and students becomes a circular, generative and self-poietic process. According to the definition by Winstone and Carless (2019, p. 6) it is “a process whereby students are proactive in seeking, making sense of, and using comments on their performance or their approaches to learning”.

In order to activate the feedback loop, it is essential to set up an interactive learning environment, connecting the time and spaces of the classroom and the outside-the-classroom, within which the analogic and digital tools and systems and the social agents are aggregated, mutually interfacing: a Digital Learning Ecosystem (Jeladze, Pata & Quaicoe, 2017), dynamic and hybrid, where the transformative processes are determined in a co-evolutive and collaborative way.

This contribution illustrates a feedback micro-path practised within the educational ecosystem through the tool called One Minute Paper, that is a device which enables the student in an active reflection condition on his/her learning path in an ongoing logic of interaction with the Professor. Angelo and Cross (1993) inserted it among the Classroom Assessment Technique (CAT): it is about some simple questions the students is asked to answer in a short time and which enable to get regular and timely feedbacks on how the students are implementing and managing their learning paths, on how they interpret and re-elaborate the concepts and implement processes, even in classes with many learners that therefore enable the Professor then to re-consider and adjust the didactic action and the design in project.

The aim was to activate the student’s reflection in relation to the knowledge implied in the individual didactic lesson. The student’s answers were used to re-modulate the course design and to start the following didactic intervention, in view of the observations that had emerged.

According to Nicol and MacFarlane-Dick (2006) it is in fact a tool that habilitates the dialogic feedback and that can be considered as useful to support the students’ self-regulation and alignment processes.

About n. 300 One Minute Paper produced by the students in two University courses of two different Universities were collected through online forms.
The answers were analysed according to a qualitative approach, through the identification of homologous semantic fields manually identified (Ferrari & Piccardi, 2010).

The field of the research is the Self-study one (Clarke & Erickson, 2004), a methodology based on the analysis and the reflections of the Professor-researcher’s practices, according to the recursiveness principle.

From a first analysis of the data we can suppose that the tool thanks to the activation of a feedback that is recursive and progressive along time (Carless, 2019), enabled the students to go beyond the analysis of what they simply remember, activating a metacognitive evaluation process, self-evaluation and reflection on the activated process and on the proposed contents and it enabled the Professors to adjust the design in progress and to progressively reconsider the path.

Keywords:

Feedback, Higher Education, One Minute Paper, Digital Learning Ecosystem.