Effective feedback, student motivation, and technology
I. Project Overview
Effective feedback is crucial to student motivation, goal setting, and persistence within a course, and is one important way teachers can engage with students and facilitate improvement. Additionally, there is considerable research demonstrating the benefit of feedback on learning. Learners report that feedback is most useful when it is specific, personalized to them, and integrates positive affect. Digital learning platforms, however, are ill-equipped to deliver this kind of feedback and as a result can discourage students from engaging with given feedback. Research suggests that the student learning experience can be enhanced by infusing digital feedback with social information cues (e.g., emojis). These cues increase the perceived social presence of the instructor, communicating to the student that the instructor is accessible and emotionally invested in their success. The current project is designed to test various feedback formats for online quizzes to determine the best format for rich and socially present quiz feedback and to examine their effect on learning.
II. Project Planning
The current project sought to identify effective methods for infusing social presence and media richness into automated online feedback in online quizzing materials in my PSY101 course. This included socio-emotional communication tools such as verbal statements of encouragement or supportiveness, helpful hints, and emoji faces to make automated feedback using online quizzes warmer and more friendly. I typically include weekly Brightspace quizzes in most of my courses, so most of the infrastructure necessary to complete this project was in place. However, I needed to create different experimental conditions and therefore utilized Brightspace Groups to randomly assign all students to one of two conditions. This activity served as a substitution for my usual quizzing policies with no major functional changes (i.e., students still had a full week to complete each quiz, had their lowest quiz score dropped from their overall grade, and could take quizzes as many times as they wanted throughout the week).
III. Project Implementation
Before the project started, I collaborated with another faculty member (Dr. Monica Riordan) and an undergraduate research assistant to ensure that my quiz question pool for PSY101 contained questions that were uniform in their feedback. Afterwards, we duplicated each question bank topic so that we could alter feedback for our experimental manipulation (i.e., inclusion of a supportive comment). Next, I created two student groups in Brightspace and randomly assigned students to Group 1 or Group 2 once the term’s add/drop deadline had passed. Students were responsible for completing a quiz each week, but depending on which group they were in, they either received simple correct-answer feedback or correct-answer feedback with a supportive comment. An example is below:
Quiz Question:
Psychology is the study of:
the human mind and behavior.
neuroanatomy.
mental health.
brain disorders.
Feedback:
Condition 1 (control): Correct answer feedback
(In)Correct. Psychology is defined as the study of the human mind and behavior.
Condition 2 (experimental): Supportive feedback
(In)Correct. Great work/Good try! 😊 Psychology is defined as the study of the human mind and behavior.
While students’ learning could be assessed using students’ exam scores, data on their perceptions of the feedback was collected using a pre-exam survey that included questions from the assessment experience questionnaire (AEQ) by Gibbs and Simpson (2003). Before an exam, I would give the students one week to complete the survey with the incentive of one point of extra credit for their participation, and two points of extra credit if the entire class responded before the deadline.
IV. Project Assessment
The project will be formally assessed using statistical analyses. I will assess whether one’s experimental condition (i.e., standard correct answer feedback vs. supportive feedback) led to a significant difference in exam scores. I will also assess whether one’s experimental condition led to a difference in perceptions of feedback.
V. Project Reflections and Next Steps
As this was a pilot project in one section of PSY101, the sample size was small (n = 27). Some data is missing, since some students did not take some of the pre-exam surveys, and one student missed an exam. The goal is to run a similar project in a future section of PSY101 (and potentially other courses) to collect more data and eventually have enough to present at a conference and/or publish in an academic journal.
The process of using Brightspace Groups for the quizzes was a little burdensome, as it led to two sets of quizzes in my gradebook which was sometimes confusing to see as the instructor/grader. I may seek to either refine my Brightspace skills or potentially use a different quizzing platform (e.g., H5P) to make this process more efficient.
I would like to have greater student buy-in for the pre-exam surveys. I am going to brainstorm ideas for ways to get more student responses to these critical elements of the research project. On the topic of integrating technology into my classroom in other contexts, I also tried an AI assignment in my History of Psychology course this term in which several students interviewed historical figures using the website Hello History. Students enrolled in the class were assigned a “Great Person” at the beginning of the term. There were two categories of Great People: those available on Hello History, which tended to be very well-known historical figures (e.g., Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin), and those whose identities led them to be underrepresented in the history of psychology (e.g., Mary Ainsworth, Charles Silverstein) and were therefore not on Hello History. Students whose figures were on Hello History did an AI interview assignment with their Great Person, and those whose figures were not on there ended up doing a roleplay and critical reflection assignment instead. I talk about the history of AI near the end of the course when we cover the history of Cognitive Psychology, hence my inclusion of the first option. One of my long-term goals for the course is to incorporate more diverse figures, hence my inclusion of the second option for. I wish I had been a little more thoughtful and intentional about this project so that I could assess it and discuss it in greater detail. It ended up being very exploratory, but I did gather informal data from students who found it interesting. I will likely teach this course again in 1-2 years, so I may rethink this assignment for next time