Design and implementation of a teacher-guided semi-automatic assessment feedback generator

Detailed feedback to assessments is an integral part of students’ learning experience. Students can learn from their mistakes through the teachers’ feedback. However, with the increasing workload, teachers may not have enough time to write detailed and meaningful comments to every student in every assessment. This paper aims to share our experience in designing and implementing a teacher-guided semi-automatic assessment feedback generator. We observed that students’ mistakes are repeating in nature. Instead of writing repeated comments for individual students, teachers may use our system to manage feedback templates and prepare individualized comments. Our system provides the interface for teachers to record common mistakes and comments in student assessments, and it lets teacher assign different comments to students easily. This approach does not only greatly enhance the consistency in teachers’ marking and comment generation, it also frees the teachers from repeated writing. The challenges faced in the design and implementation in our system are discussed in this paper. Copyright © 2015 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.