Enhancing Student Learning using On-Line Submission and ... - Reap

the criteria on which feedback is based has to be produced in collaboration with tutorsand students in a constructive process. This process would help address the problemsassociated with feedback and assessment which has been a one-way process, difficultto understand, negative, unreliable, inconsistent and lacking in personal relevance forfuture learning. The construction of standard and specific comments may helpaddress some of these issues and the use of computer templates may also help toreduce the burden of work on tutors and improve opportunities for personalisingfeedback, timeliness and clarity of writing which cannot always be encountered inhandwritten comments. These are therefore the areas which this study will beconsidering and the sections that follow deal with the context, the project stages andmethods, key findings and implications of the findingsThe ContextThe Department of Marketing at the University of Strathclyde is taking part in aproject funded by the Scottish Funding Council to reengineer assessment practices inHigher Education (REAP). The importance of assessment in determining studentlearning is the basis for the REAP project (see http://www.reap.ac.uk The departmentis seeking to improve the feedback process, improve overall learning experience andreduce the administrative burden of marking submissions for a large class using newtechnologies (WebCT). Multiple Choice Question tests and on-line feedback using abank of comments have been introducedThis paper is based on the use of on-line feedback comments with a first year class(Principles of Marketing) which has 533 students. The class is taught by one Lecturer,a Senior Tutor and 10 Graduate Tutors who are in charge of the 47 tutorial groups.The tutors have all experience of teaching and have also been students themselves upuntil recently.Students used to receive feedback by means of a standard proforma which had beendesigned by the class coordinator, tutors and an academic practice member of staffand had been in use for 10 years. The electronic feedback at Strathclyde uses an inhousedeveloped template employing Visual Basics Software and is used incombination with traditional class methods (lectures and tutorials) and seeks toimprove its quantity, quality and timing. The electronic template contains generalexplicit comments which are used to generate a Word document which tutors are ableedit and personalise.Criteria Development ProcessThe process (see table 1) was based on the two-level model (student/staff interaction)with 8 stages suggested by Rust et al (2005, pp 237-238) which involves the sharedopportunity to create and discuss criteria by staff, discussing this with the students,applying it and then obtaining evaluation to feed into the improvement of the criteria.The Department already had explicit printed criteria of a shopping-list type withboxes for tutors to write comments and was used for every class. For this project thislist of criteria which included areas such as overall content, presentation standards,research, citation, content specific areas, conclusions and recommendations wasreviewed.4