Understanding Students’ Engagement with Personalised Feedback Messages

Abstract

Feedback is a major factor of student success within higher education learning. However, recent changes-such as increased class sizes and socioeconomic diversity of the student population-challenged the provision of effective student feedback. Although the use of educational technology for personalised feedback to diverse students has gained traction, the feedback gap still exists: educators wonder which students respond to feedback and which do not. In this study, a set of trackable Call to Action (CTA) links was embedded in two sets of feedback messages focusing on students' time management, with the goal of (1) examining the association between feedback engagement and course success and (2), to predict students' reaction to provided feedback. We also conducted two focus groups to further examine students' perception of provided feedback messages. Our results revealed that early engagement with the feedback was associated with higher chances of succeeding in the course. Likewise, previous engagement with feedback was highly predictive of students' engagement in the future, and also that certain student sub-populations, (e.g., female students), were more likely to engage than others. Such insight enables instructors to ask "why" questions, improve feedback processes and narrow the feedback gap. Practical implications of our findings are further discussed.

REAPING THE AFFORDANCES AND CONSTRAINTS OF CANVAS-DRIVEN ASYNCHRONOUS ONLINE DISCUSSION BOARDS (AODBs)

“…The visual representation (see Figure 8) demonstrates students who have received feedback in the form of likes and replies, encouraging them to respond and provide personalized and constructive feedback on their peers' responses. These observations are consistent with the research by Iraj et al (2020). They assert that personalized feedback on posts is essential for raising students' levels of involvement in the future.…”

Assessing Emotional Intelligence Influence on Students in Private Higher Education, London, UK

“…Some critics have suggested that the term's broad range of components makes it more difficult to define it precisely and understand what it really means. Researchers are further perplexed by the debate over whether emotional intelligence (EI) is a talent or a characteristic, which leads to a variety of performance assessments and self-respect questionnaires with countless findings that would be at odds with one another (Iraj et al, 2020;Huynh et al, 2018). Others, however, believed that tests for emotional intelligence (EI) might not be valid because EI was closely related to personality and intelligence (Restubog et al, 2020), and they argued that there was not enough evidence to support the validity of the content of such tools because there was a lack of a sound theoretical foundation and ambiguity in the content of EI measures (Can et al, 2021).…”