Feedback on feedback: eliciting learners’ responses to written feedback through student-generated screencasts

Abstract

Despite the potential benefits of assignment feedback, learners often fail to use it effectively. This study examines the ways in which adult distance learners engage with written feedback on one of their assignments. Participants were 10 undergraduates studying Spanish at the Open University, UK. Their responses to feedback were elicited by means of student-generated screencast (Jing®) recordings in which students talked through the feedback written by their tutors. The recordings were analysed in terms of the students’ cognitive, affective and metacognitive responses to the tutors’ feedback. Results show that, while students do engage with tutor feedback and make active efforts to integrate it, they sometimes use ineffective strategies, especially when tutor and student make different assumptions about the role of feedback. The richness of the data obtained from the Feedback on feedback (F on F) method suggests that it has the potential to promote much needed feedback dialogue between students and tutors.

Keywords:

• feedback
• learner engagement
• distance education
• video technology

Subject classification codes:

• L (Education)
• T (Technology)
• P (Language and Literature)

Acknowledgements

This project was funded by the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), a UK public body aiming to provide leadership in the use of ICT in learning, teaching, research and administration. We also wish to thank the tutors who agreed to their feedback being used, the students who took part in the study and Peter Furnborough who tested the briefing notes. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and our colleagues Felicity Harper and Hannelore Green for their valuable feedback. This work was supported by JISC under the Assessment and Feedback Programme, strand B: Evidence and Evaluation.