Abstract
Nowadays in Higher Education, the teaching procedures that lead to better Learning Outcomes (LO) require continuous analysis. Rubrics such as teaching feedback procedures have demonstrated their effectiveness at heightening the reflection of university students on their own practice. The aims were: 1) to study the effects of different types of rubric-based feedback [from process-oriented feedback to traditional feedback] on LO and on student perceptions of subject matter knowledge (SPKI) in a comparison between students in engineering and students in the social sciences; 2) to analyze the relation between metacognitive skills and motivation with LO and SPKI; 3) to validate the results with structural equation modeling (SEM). The study comprised a total of 171 university students (n = 80 from the mechanical engineering degree and n = 91 from social sciences degree). A quasi-experimental design with a control group was used to test aim 1 and a descriptive correlational design to test aim 2. SEM was applied to validate the results (aim 3). Significant differences were found between both types of rubric-based feedback (process-oriented v. traditional) in relation to LO, though not in relation to SPKI. The effects of the degree type were noted in LO but no in SPKI. Likewise, a relation between SPKI and motivation skills was found in engineering students. Accordingly, the type of degree and the characteristics of the subject modules appear to be determining factors in successful learning, while SPKI is directly linked to motivation skills. The SEM results validated these conclusions.
Highlights
At present, one of the challenges of higher education is how to improve both learning processes and student performance
In view of the theoretical assumptions and investigations referred to above, the research questions of this work were as follows: RQ1: “Will the students who receive process-oriented feedback have better LO than the students who receive gradeoriented feedback and could those LO be affected by the type of degree?”
We have analyzed the relation between metacognitive skills and motivational skills among two types of students in terms of LO and SPKI after [RQ3, RQ4 and RQ5, RQ6, respectively]
Summary
One of the challenges of higher education is how to improve both learning processes and student performance. From the standpoint of that discipline, the multiple variables that interact in the teaching–learning process must be considered. Some of those variables are related to the teacher, others with learning and others with the task, and they all interact through reciprocal determinism. The analysis of the teaching–learning process must be multi-dimensional. The teacher-specific variables relate to the style of teaching in the instruction process. Influential variables include previous knowledge of the task to be learnt, task-related motivation, and learning skills among which metacognitive skills stand out (Flavell, 1981; Efklides, 2011; Van der Stel and Veenman, 2014; Sáiz and Montero, 2015)
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