Re-igniting the personal touch: Using video to improve feedback with Foundation
Re-igniting the personal touch: Using video to improve feedback with Foundation Year students
Wendy Garnham and Heather Taylor
Outline
Feedback is the one factor that is paramount to student outcomes (Hattie, 2009). Yet in recent years, it has become clear that this same factor is consistently rated lower than others in National Student Surveys (HEFCE 2010, http://www.hefce.ac.uk/learning/nss/). The reasons for this lower rating appear to be multifactorial and include factors such as difficulty in understanding the meaning of written comments in relation to assignments, a lack of advice about how to feed-forward with improvements and a focus on spelling and grammar which Duncan (2007) refers to as the mechanical aspects of a task.
It is not just students that have raised dissatisfaction with feedback processes. As student numbers increase, so the opportunity for tutors to interact with and support individual students becomes limited. As Carless, Joughin and Liu (2006) identified, tutors often complain about the time-consuming nature of feedback. Such concerns could have implications for the timing of when feedback is released, the detail given in feedback and the frequency of feedback, all of which are included in Gibbs and Simpson’s (2004) outline of the six key drivers of positive and effective feedback.
These concerns have led to a focus on the use of alternative modes of feedback such as the use of audio feedback. Merry and Orsmond (2008) and Ice et al. (2007) both report positive benefits of using this, for example, Merry and Orsmond’s participants reported that with audio feedback, the use of intonation was useful in helping them understand the content of the feedback better and Ice et al. found that audio feedback led to a feeling of increased involvement and greater retention of content than written feedback. Ice et al used auditory feedback to try and create a sense of community amongst online learners. Student satisfaction for audio feedback was reported to be “extremely high” with students perceiving it to be associated with the tutor caring more about the student. Ice et al suggest that the effect of using audio feedback was to increase both feelings of involvement and community interactions.
Ice et al’s findings have been replicated elsewhere. For example. Gould and Day (2013) found audio feedback to be seen as more personalized and supportive than written feedback as well as more detailed. Even in terms of accessing the feedback, Lunt and Curran (2010) suggest that students are at least 10 times more likely to open audio files compared to collecting written feedback.
However, tutors often have mixed feelings about audio feedback as demonstrated by Cavanaugh and Song (2014) in their study of online learning for a composition course. Even though students were positive about the use of audio feedback, mentioning the ability to pick up cues from the tutor’s voice, paying closer attention to the content and the increased level of detail