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Describes a feedback system for distant students including the tools and documents to provide feedback on frequent fixed response assignments and on projects or essay response assignments. A distance feedback system depends upon carefully planned, written assignments; specified evaluation criteria; and technology. It includes documentation, progress tracking, standardized responses based upon the specified evaluation criteria, and multiple assessments during the course. The proposed feedback system accommodates technological limitations yet provides useful feedback to facilitate distant student learning. The system could be adapted to benefit students enrolled in traditional instruction. A description of the feedback system components follows a brief introduction to instructional feedback and feedback levels and functions.

In response to the less satisfied National Student Survey, UK universities have committed to transform assessment and feedback experience. This paper aims to explore how the diversity of online assessment and feedback offer a better learning experience for international students.

By using the action research method, the research investigated academic and international students' first experience on audio feedback and online text. Video interviews and online questionnaires were carried out.

All research participants would like to receive assessment feedback in audio form. This reflects the learning experience of students and suggests that the support of a higher educational institution or a tutor could provide for assessment and feedback enhancement in the digital world is mandatory. Other than the technological and instrumental advantage, the “human element” of audio feedback makes it unique and interesting to listen to in contrast to online written feedback.

It is recognised that the number of student participants was small but the qualitative findings demonstrate some key issues in relation to international student experience and the effectiveness and engagement of assessment feedback that may inspire future empirical research.

Some conditions under which feedback is likely to be effective are not met as frequently as originally believed, audio feedback can be thoughtfully considered as an alternative assessment feedback mechanism for international students.

The “‘human element’ of audio assessment feedback” defeats online written text for international students. They appreciate the effort spent by the tutor to provide them assessment and feedback personally by “talking to them”.

Lack of appropriate student support and drawbacks in academic progression signify the importance of enhancing assessment and feedback in higher education (HE). Although assessment and feedback are significant in HE, minimal empirical research holistically explores the best practices. This study aims to address the niche and develop a decisive guideline for enhancing assessment setting and feedback provision within HE curricula.

A systematic approach was taken to obtain data for the study: a literature review underpinning the thematic content analysis of study documents, followed by semi-structured interviews. Document analysis contained mid-module reviews/student feedback; rubrics used in assessment; and formative/summative feedback provided for the graded work. Documental analysis informed the key attributes of the semi-structured interview. Interpretive structural modelling (ISM) analysis identified the influence and reliance of each driver.

This study revealed 15 drivers – 4 fundamental, 6 significant and 5 important – for enhancing assessment and feedback. The level partitioning from the ISM analysis established that all assessment and feedback needs to be underpinned by the university policy and fed into the assessment regime and marking scheme. This study identified that National Student Survey results were significantly improved due to implementing said drivers compared with the national and sector benchmarks.

The developed drivers enable the best practices in assessment setting and feedback provision. The level partition diagram can be used as a decisive guideline or a provisional framework in assessment and feedback provision for quality assurance in HE.

This study is one of, if not the only, to develop a guideline for signposting drivers and their influence and reliance to enhance assessment and feedback in a holistic HE setting. The developed drivers and the level partition diagram bring novelty and add to the current body of knowledge.

The aim of the study is to explore perceptions of the impact of assessment feedback by international undergraduate nursing students. Research to date indicates that summative assessment feedback may impact significantly on student achievement but if it is undertaken sub optimally or does not provide students with the opportunity to engage with the process and reflexively respond, it can also be exceptionally damaging to the learning experience.

A scoping exercise of overall student feedback experience was initially collated via the adoption of an Interpretive Phenomenological Approach (IPA). Participants were recruited via purposive sampling and the LEGO® Serious Play® method was used to collect data. Analysis with Quirkos software was used to examine the salience as well as commonality of findings as an integral part of a recognised five-step thematic analytical approach.

Feedback was perceived, by students, as significantly impacting factor in relation to their overall progression, attainment and retention rates. Themes generated from the findings evidenced student perceptions that summative feedback is a positive driver and source of motivation for academic success and progression. It was perceived that levels of attainment were related to the clarity, quality and individualised nature of feedback that students received and that this was perceived to be evident in their final grades. These were accompanied by perceptions that feedback clarity also determined the potential of breaking down perceived student barriers to learning, their perceived capacity for effective assignment planning and preparation and the likelihood of them having any positive collective or individual interpersonal relationships with their tutors. Summarised, students perceived that feedback ought to lead to student empowerment in managing their studies and as such it ought to be clear, straightforward and non-ambiguous.

The methodological design of the study means that generalisability from its findings was never intended or possible. However, there may be the potential transferability of findings to similar institutions and contexts of nurse education with students who have similar demographic profiling. The study was also a means of providing an insight into the lived experience of students which could be used in the prospective adaptation of feedback mechanisms for staff at a local level within Higher Education.

The study reveals the perceived impact of gamification as a mechanism of summative assessment as conveyed by a designated group of students. Whilst specific recommendations for change can only be made within the context specificity of the research, there may be aspects of the findings which are potentially transferable to other similar contexts of Higher Education delivery whose pedagogical approaches mirror those in operation at the institution where the research was undertaken. It became apparent that the standardisation of feedback approaches offered many opportunities to improve existing systems. The issue of monitoring workloads is also of significance in terms of the level and degree of summative assessment and feedback that academic staff can undertake.

The study revealed the perceived magnitude of assessment feedback on progression, attainment and retention rates, alongside the perceived need for a universal feedback template and the opportunity to provide audio-video feedback. This study adds to existing knowledge in the field of pedagogic practice about both the execution of LEGO® Serious Play® as a research methodology and why the perceptions of feedback as articulated and illuminated by a group of contemporary nursing students ought to matter in the context of Higher Education.

The purpose of this study is to examine the uptake of peer vs. instructor feedback provided on written essays by undergraduates in a writing course at a public university in Saudi Arabia.

This was a classroom intervention exploratory study with 16 pairs of students attending a writing class over a period of 14 weeks.

Analysis of feedback and uptake indicated that the students incorporated a high rate (85.21%) of feedback in revising their essays. The results also showed that the quantity of students’ uptake of instructor feedback (88.77%) was higher than that of peer feedback (82.17%). In terms of the rate of uptake of global feedback focusing on content and organization vs. local feedback focusing on language and formatting, the rate of uptake of local feedback (85.34%) was slightly higher than the uptake of global feedback (84.90%). The current results also showed that the quality of feedback (peer vs. instructor feedback and global vs. local feedback) also varied. Students’ perspectives on feedback underlined their perceived value of feedback on writing, their preference for instructor feedback and the perceived benefits of providing and receiving feedback.

This study investigated an area that has been under-researched in the Saudi higher education context and it has direct implications for the provision of feedback in writing classes.

Student teachers completing a three year pre‐service primary teaching degree in New Zealand experience a practical teaching component called professional practice. This is carried out in school placements for block periods and involves a visiting lecturer from their institution observing them teaching to ensure they are meeting their specific learning outcomes. One of the significant aspects of the lecturer visit is the giving of both spoken and written feedback to students on a variety of areas of their teaching practice. This action research was carried out over a two‐year period using the experiences of students in their second and third years to investigate the quality of feedback they received and the ways in which it could be improved. Throughout the study, the researcher used a qualitative research approach that involved in‐depth interviews and surveys with the students and two focus‐group discussions with lecturers. This approach allowed her to focus on her own practice of giving feedback to student teachers and to discover some unexpected aspects about herself as a practitioner. These reflections and other aspects of the study identified the key aspects for best quality feedback practice as; written reflections by the student teachers pre‐prepared questions by the observing lecturer in order to provide structure and guidance for the feedback process; establishment of as much time as possible for the feedback discussions; lecturers employing coaching skills for adult learners; honesty as a valued and welcomed trait; recognition that tacit knowledge is valuable and should be shared; and lecturers being readily available to students and able to provide them with prompt responses.

This study aims to examine the impact of the informational value of feedback choices (confirmatory versus critical feedback) on students’ performance, their choice to revise and the time they spend designing posters and reading feedback in a computer-based assessment game, Posterlet.

An empirical correlational study was conducted to collect the choices to seek confirmatory or critical feedback and to revise posters in a poster design task from 106 grade 8 students from a middle school in California via Posterlet.

The results of the study show that critical uninformative feedback is associated with students’ performance, and critical informative feedback is associated with their learning strategies (i.e. feedback dwell time and willingness to revise), while confirmatory informative feedback is negatively associated with both performance and learning strategies.

The study controlled the choice students were given regarding the valence of their feedback but not regarding the informational value of their feedback. Additionally, the study was conducted with middle-school students, and more research is needed to ascertain whether the results generalize to other populations.

The findings can be used to balance the design of the informational content of feedback messages to support student performance in an open-ended, creative design task. This study may also inform the design and implementation of agents (e.g. virtual characters) able to provide user-adaptive feedback for online interactive learning environments.

This study constitutes the first research to examine the informational value of feedback that is chosen rather than received, the latter being the prevalent model of delivering feedback in education.

Feedback is usually given for the primary benefit of the feedback recipient and often involves the unidirectional delivery of information. The purpose of this paper is to reverse this emphasis and examines the impacts on students of giving feedback to staff as an ongoing dialogue in the delivery of a teaching unit.

This novel study uses surveys and focus groups for an in-depth case study of the impact of students giving feedback to staff. It examines different aspects of students’ experiences related to their sense of being supported and valued, together with issues of relevance, timeliness and the actionability of feedback.

Results show that the regular giving of feedback by students and their subsequent academic actions can help increase students’ sense of being supported and valued. The strongest correlations occurred between the responses of those who felt valued and supported and their perception that their own feedback was acted upon during the semester. There is also some evidence suggesting that students felt valued when observing that other students’ feedback was acted upon either immediately or in the future.

The single case study approach to this research means that only one cohort of students was tested. Research on further cohorts would help to validate the findings.

This study could have implications for teaching quality and practice in better directing, communicating, engaging and following up on student feedback.

Whilst the benefit to the staff of student feedback is well documented, there is little evidence documenting benefits to students. This study addresses this gap in existing research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate an area of growing importance that is widely recognised in the literature relating to the issue of how to improve ways that assessments and feedback are provided to students within higher education. This paper reports on a study that aimed to explore the views of both educators (n=70) and students (n=540) on feedback and feed-forward at a UK university. The study also investigated their experience and attitudes to social media applications as a means of enhancing access to feedback within the context of mobile learning.

The research approach adopted in this study predominately conforms to a quantitative research design though embeds elements of qualitative research via a “mixed methods” approach. The overall methodology of the paper adheres to an exploratory case study in a higher education environment to identify various issues and approaches that could be addressed or enhanced to aid ways that assessments and feedback are disseminated to students within higher education.

Participants’ views were sought in relation to students receiving learning materials, as well as feedback from tutors directly to their smartphones and mobile devices. In addition, the study explored possible reasons for students not wanting to use social media and mobile devices for their learning and feedback. Overall, the results indicated a positive attitude on the part of educators and students to using mobile devices and social media applications for teaching and learning purposes.

The case study presented in this paper draws on findings from one higher educational institution. Further research is required to determine the generalisability of the findings to allow comparison of the findings to be undertaken within other higher education institutions.

The originality of the paper is that it provides detailed empirical evidence and findings that provide several important implications in relation to enhancing the student learning experience and providing considerable improvements to the way that feedback is provided that make it more likely that students will take more notice to feedback and act upon it. This in turn enables educators to better plan and manage their teaching and student experience online and through students’ mobile devices. The value of this study is that it explores views of both educators and students, whereas many other previous studies tend to focus on the views of either educators or students.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the rationale behind the use of a unique paper‐based individualised accounting assignment, which automated the provision to students of immediate formative and timely summative feedback.

As students worked towards completing their assignment, the package provided immediate formative feedback with sufficient indicators for the student to identify that they had made an error and provided encouragement for the student to take appropriate corrective action until they were satisfied that their answer was correct. Once the student was satisfied with their work, their submission was automatically marked by the assessment package according to the pre‐set marking scheme.

The assignment experience reported here has shown the potential for interactive spreadsheets to be created for a wide range of rule‐based accounting problems to provide formative and summative feedback. The package can be (and has been) easily extended beyond financial accounting to many other accounting‐ and non‐accounting‐related fields, e.g. tax, audit, economics and statistics. In fact, individualised assignments utilising interactive spreadsheets appear to have broad applicability in any educational context (including mathematics, engineering and science) where a correct numerical answer is required.

The unique automated feedback and marking package was developed by the author utilising Microsoft's Excel spreadsheeting tool. The marking package generated a detailed summary providing important feedback to students clearly identifying correct answers and specific problem areas, enabling the student to review these aspects. The package also provided feedback to the teacher identifying the cohort's performance on each item in the assessment.