Teacher-guided semi-automatic assessment feedback generation: A case study

Detailed feedback to student assessments is important to the students’ study because it helps the students locate their mistakes and suggests how they can correct the mistakes. However, with the increasing workload of teachers in higher institutions, teachers may not have enough time to write detailed and meaningful comments to every student in every assessment. With the observation that most of the students’ mistakes are repeating in nature, for every assessment item, the variation in comments is limited. Instead of writing repeating comments for individual students, teachers may use a semi-automatic assessment feedback system (AFS) for preparing comments to the students. For each assessment item, a teacher can prepare new a comment to the student using the system when he meets a variation, or he can simply select a previous comment if it is similar to a previous case. This approach greatly enhances the consistency in teachers’ marking and comment generation, and frees the teachers from repeated writing. In this research, we will study the use of AFS in delivering an IT course. We believe that AFS can save teachers’ time in preparing detailed comments for assessment items and can improve students’ perception on assessment feedbacks.