Using technology to encourage student engagement with feedback: a literature review

Abstract

This article presents a review of the literature over the past 10 years into the use of technological interventions that tutors might use to encourage students to engage with and action the feedback that they receive on their assessment tasks. The authors hypothesise that technology has the potential to enhance student engagement with feedback. During the literature review, a particular emphasis was placed on investigating how students might better use feedback when it is published online. This includes where an adaptive release technique is applied requiring students to submit an action plan based on their feedback to activate the release of their grade, and electronic generation of feedback using statement banks. Key journals were identified and a snowball technique was used to select relevant literature. The use of technology to support and enhance student learning and assessment is well documented in the literature, and effective feedback practices are similarly well published. However, in terms of the use of technology to support and enhance feedback processes and practices (i.e. production, publication, delivery and students making use of feedback through technology), we found the literature to be limited.

Engaging Students with Audio Feedback

“…Perhaps this is at the root of the widespread student dissatisfaction with assessment feedback in higher education. Technological advances in delivery of feedback are educationally neutral (Hepplestone et al 2011). It is only the relationships between the student and the instructor which can enhance learning.…”

“…With substantial investment by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in learning technologies such as Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), the last decade has seen technology increasingly used to mediate between students and teaching staff (Hepplestone et al 2011). While institutions need to recoup investment and manage growing student numbers in a time of financial stringency, it is valid to ask whether technology is the answer or merely generates another problem with feedback on student work, increasing remoteness from teaching staff.…”

Supporting Learners' Agentic Engagement With Feedback: A Systematic Review and a Taxonomy of Recipience Processes

“…Whereas many papers reported using technology as a tool to support self-appraisal, the primary intended purpose of technology-based interventions was to enable pre-HE and HE learners to become more motivated to engage with feedback (see Hepplestone, Holden, Irwin, Parkin, & Thorpe, 2011, for a review from HE). Perhaps for this reason, much of the primary emphasis among these papers was on learners' satisfaction with-rather than their use of-their feedback.…”

Video-based feedback on student assessment: scarily personal

“…A literature review on the use of technology in feedback by Hepplestone, Holden, Irwin, Parkin, and Thorpe (2011) made no reference to video-based feedback. However, in a similar review of technologies for learner-centred feedback, Costello and Crane (2010) identified video as having some benefits, but their conclusion is based on two sources, only one of which was based on empirical evidence (Parton, Crain-Dorough, & Hancock, 2010), while the other (Denton, Madden, Roberts, & Rowe, 2008) is itself making a passing reference to a much older article from 1997 (Hase & Saenger, 1997).…”