Multisource feedback for STEM students improves academic performance

Abstract

Motivating students to productively engage course material and perform to their potential is among our most urgent challenges as STEM educators. Professional organizations commonly seek to motivate employees by providing performance feedback from multiple raters who may include supervisors, peers, subordinates, clients, and others. With support from National Science Foundation grant EEC #1158728, the present study used a newly developed online delivery system to provide personalized multisource feedback to a sample of 206 undergraduate STEM students in a science and technology problem-solving course. PersonalityPad.org is an automated multisource feedback platform that allows users to generate their own personalized multisource feedback. This process incorporates prevalent 360-degree feedback strategies and “best practices” for effective feedback administration. A longitudinal experiment within an interventional framework evaluated the hypothesis that multisource conscientiousness feedback would provoke goal-directedness and motivate adaptive action. Students who received conscientiousness feedback from multiple sources – including friends, parents, and teachers – participated more in class and submitted higher quality homework assignments afterward, leading to significantly higher final course grades (M = 83.90) compared to a control group in the same class (M = 78.79). A structural analysis of relationships among key variables indicated that post-intervention goal-directedness plays a key intermediary role between receiving personalized feedback and achieving subsequent self-development goals. Implications are discussed from academic and social perspectives.