Enhancing the process of feedback for students

Primary supervisor

Yi-Shan Tsai

Feedback is crucial to learning success; yet, higher education continues to struggle with effective feedback processes. It is important to recognise that feedback as a process requires both teachers and students to take active roles and work as ‘partners’. This project seeks to enhance effective feedback processes by 1) exploring the alignment between current feedback practice with student-centred feedback principles and 2) investigating into student experience with feedback. The overall project will adopt mixed methods explained as follows:

Objective 1: Understanding the extent to which current feedback practice in Monash University aligns with student-centred feedback principles (focusing on future impact, promoting agency, and facilitating sensemaking).

Approach: Developing a feedback theory-informed natural language processing (NLP) model to enable large-scale evaluation of written feedback, and analysing a large set of feedback extracted from Moodle using this model to understand the presence of student-centred feedback elements, the commonality and differences in feedback provision across disciplines.

Objective 2: Understanding Monash University students’ experience with feedback (What challenges do students face when it comes to making sense of feedback and acting on it? What makes feedback work? How can we utilise data analytics to support this process?)

Approach: Carrying out a series of focus groups with students to understand their experience with feedback. Use thematic analysis to obtain deep insights about student needs, current level of feedback literacy, and opportunities to enhance effective feedback processes using data analytics.

 

Students may choose to work towards either or both objectives.

Student cohort

Single Semester

Required knowledge

  • Student applying to work on Objective 1 is expected to have basic knowledge in Data Science, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, preferably with strong programming skills in the Python language
  • Student applying to work on Objective 2 is expected to have experience with user-centred design, human-centred interaction, or educational research in general. Experience in qualitative research is desirable, though not essential.