Teaching development grants final and financial report: Studying formative feedback strategies to enhance student learning outcomes

Formative feedback is generated by teachers as strategies to engage learners to constantly reflect on how they can approach, orient, and evaluate learning, which leads to successful learning outcomes. This project adopts a quasi-experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of formative feedback strategies on students’ academic and psychological outcomes. Students from four courses (N=160) will be invited to join the experimental group (with specific formative feedback strategies) or control group (without specific formative feedback strategies) 1. In the experimental group, specific formative feedback strategies are carried out, including setting study goals, discussing performance criteria, self-assessment, one-minute reflection, teacher comments on process draft assignment to help students troubleshoot their own performance and self correct. In the control group, courses will be taught as usual. Artifacts related to students’ work, teacher reflective record, lesson video records, and teacher and observer’s dialogues will be used to examine the effectiveness of these strategies. On evaluating academic outcome, content analysis of student assignment by SOLO Taxonomy2 and Bloom’s Taxonomy3 will be used to evaluate the quality of the two course assignments (interim and final essay/project), which may tell the improvement by intra-comparison of individual students. To assess psychological outcomes, students will be required to complete a questionnaire at the beginning (as baseline), in the interim and at the end of the course. The questionnaire consists of some motivation scales: student relationship with teacher, perceived self-efficacy, learning goals, and avoidance of help seeking, and some open ended questions that ask about students’ perception of the formative feedback strategies. Teaching resources including exemplar lessons and instructional materials will be developed for sharing the use of formative feedback widely in the HKIEd community. References: 1. The sample size is estimated based on the average number of 40 per group, to be confirmed by actual class size of the course groups in 2013-2014. 2. Biggs’ Solo (Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome) Taxonomy is a systematic way of describing how a learner’s performance develops from simple to complex levels in their learning. There are 5 stages, namely Pre-structural, Uni-structural, Multi-structural in a quantitative phrase and Relational and Extended Abstract in a qualitative phrase (Lucander, Brown & Knutsson, 2010; Boulton-Lewis, 1994) 3. Bloom’s Taxonomy is a systematic way of describing how a learner’s performance develops from simple to complex levels in their affective, psychomotor and cognitive domain of learning. In their cognitive domain, there are six stages, namely: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation (Gomez & Kurz, 2011; Starr, Manaris & Stalvey, 2008)