Enhancing Student Learning through Proactive Feedback Based Adaptive Teaching for Engineering Courses

Abstract

This paper presents a proactive anonymous feedback based adaptive teaching for enhancing student learning for engineering courses. In conventional university teaching, typically, students come to the class and instructors lecture the material, assign home assignments, take exams, etc. After grading assignments or exams, the instructor provides feedback to students. Most of the time, students are reluctant to ask questions or ask instructor to revisit the topic which was already covered. However, there is no immediate anonymous feedback mechanism for each topic or class to notify the instructor about topics which are not clear to students. There are advantages that enhance students’ learning experience by using a proactive anonymous feedback approach in teaching, learning and assessment. In this paper, we present the immediate impacts of proactive anonymous feedback based adaptive teaching on student learning and assessment. Furthermore, anonymous online based feedback mechanism provides faster feedback than conventional mechanism (where students wait until the first exam or so). Immediate feedback for each topic discussed in the class streamlines the process of reporting and the provision of active studying. The results show that students get better grade and instructors get better student evaluation score since the anonymous feedback provides a mechanism for students to ask questions anonymously and the instructors get an opportunity to answer the questions or concerns in a timely manner. We implemented the proactive anonymous feedback approach in many courses in different semesters and observed similar results. However, as an example, we present one course and instructor to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.