Teaching advancement with Phased Assessments and Looped Feedback (PALF) model

ABSTRACT

Feedback can improve or impair students’ learning performance, depending on its timing and constructiveness. Given the diversity of students’ study goals and overall performance in the assessment tasks within most classes, a group of students can experience a deteriorated performance from delayed corrective feedback, and another group can suffer immediate deterioration in their learning performance following negative feedback. The implementation of the Phased Assessments and Looped Feedback (PALF) model has made a demonstrable contribution to improving students’ learning outcomes when used to teach about 120 students undertaking the first-year cornerstone engineering subjects.

This paper demonstrates how the PALF model has improved students’ grades between two consecutively phased tasks. Furthermore, university administered student feedback on subjects’ (SFS) surveys and specific questionnaire methods were conducted and critically reviewed to evaluate students’ reflection on the PALF model, which demonstrates its immediate positive impact on students’ experience with the quality of feedback received. The SFS scoring trends are seen elevating following the application of the new model and sustained its level over several years of implementation.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• formative assessment
• assessment for learning
• feedback
• feedback timing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).