Abstract
Formative assessment generates feedback on students’ performance, therebyaccelerating and improving student learning. Anecdotal evidence gathered by anumber of evaluations has hypothesised that audio feedback may be capable ofenhancing student learning more than other approaches. In this paper we report onthe preliminary findings of a quasi-experimental study employing qualitativetechniques for triangulation, conducted to evaluate the efficacy of formative audiofeedback on student learning. We focus on the delivery of ‘voice emails’ toundergraduate students (n = 24) and evaluate the efficacy of such feedback informative assessment and ergo students’ learning, as well as achieving a betterunderstanding of students’ feedback behaviour post-delivery. The results indicatethat audio feedback better conforms to existing models of ‘quality’ formativefeedback, can enhance the student learning experience and can be more efficientin feedback delivery. Despite this, and high levels of feedback re-use by studentparticipants, the audio treatment group underperformed in learning tasks whencompared with the control group. Differences between the groups were notstatistically significant and analyses of individual and mean learning gains acrossthe treatment group provide little indication of improvements in learning.
Highlights
Formative assessment has been shown to be effective in most educational scenarios (Black and William 1998) and its importance continues to be well recognised within pedagogical communities (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick 2006)
With such ordinal data it is conventional to consider median results, mean results have been included for completeness
It is worth noting that Ice et al (2007) attempted to examine the degree to which feedback was applied by students in future work. This exploratory study aimed to investigate and evaluate the efficacy of audio technologies in delivering formative feedback and its influence on student learning. It was motivated by the potential for time efficiencies in feedback delivery and as a potential solution to the lack of formative learning at higher education
Summary
Formative assessment has been shown to be effective in most educational scenarios (Black and William 1998) and its importance continues to be well recognised within pedagogical communities (Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick 2006). The increased level of personalisation possible in audio coupled with variations in voice intonation assisted in fostering student motivation and interest in their learning, some students found the lack of a written record for later reference to be problematic. Additional staff benefits, such as time savings, avoiding the ‘stress’ of drafting and structuring a written arguments, were reported
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