Feedback on feedback: Exploring students' perceptions of the how feedback on their learning helps or hinders learning effectiveness

Beverley Oliver, Sue Jones and Beatrice Tucker
Curtin University of Technology

Keywords: student evaluation; feedback; teaching and learning

Curtin's new online student evaluation system (eVALUate) comprises a unit survey with eleven quantitative items and 2 qualitative items. This survey asks students their perceptions of what helps their achievement of unit learning outcomes, their engagement and motivation and overall satisfaction. For each quantitative item, students rate their level of agreement (strongly agree, agree, disagree strongly disagree) or select 'unable to judge (UJ).' The construct and criterion validity of the instrument have been established. Internal consistency and internal reliability has been established through statistical analysis.

In the semester 1 2006 event, data was obtained from 25090 unit survey responses. In this event less than 1% of responses were missing for each item. These were largely from students who logged in but did not answer any items before submitting the survey. With the exception of one item, 'UJ' was selected by a small number of respondents (1.1-3.1%). However one quantitative item which asks students to rate their level of agreement on whether feedback on their work helped them to achieve the unit learning outcomes showed a higher proportion of 'UJ' (5.5%) as a response. Further analysis of this item was conducted.

CEQuery was used to sort qualitative comments into domains and subdomains, and SPSS Text Analysis for Surveys was used to examine major themes and connections within each subdomain as they relate to feedback and assessment. A visual representation of the Needs Improvement: Assessment: Feedback comments generated through SPSS Text Analysis showed a strong association between "more", "feedback" and "assignments." This analysis suggests that students are saying they want more feedback on assignments. This presentation reports the results of the analysis of students' comments.