learning - Academic Conferences Limited

Rachel Fitzgerald
consideration of the most appropriate way to provide meaningful and memorable feedback is an
issue, particularly as the students are first years and generally in need of academic skills guidance.
Ensuring that the students can access the feedback easily is the first hurdle, Gibbs & Simpson (2004)
suggest that if the students cannot then see the relevance of feedback to any of their other work, they
will just check the grade and chuck the rest in the bin. Other studies demonstrate that students do not
register feedback as feedback unless it is made absolutely apparent, Rani & Yahya (2009).
Assessment is more effective when the criteria is absolutely clear to students, Gibbs (1981), Rani &
Yahya (2009), Holmes & Papageorgiou (2009), therefore feedback should relate to the criteria to
make it understandable and relevant to each individual student but with large student numbers this is
difficult to achieve, and has the potential to lead to perfunctory feedback, Brown (2001). Even with
high student numbers, there is an institutional expectation that turnaround from assignment
submission to receiving feedback will be three weeks, which sometimes leads to rushed, ineffective
feedback. Against this context, it seems a good time to try something new in an attempt to avoid the
pitfalls of repetition whilst maintaining some aspect of individuality for students. As Saunders et al
(2005) suggest, a good teacher is one will take advantage of ICT opportunities in order to enrich the
students experience.
4. Action Research as a methodology
Action Research (AR) is a way for practitioners to engage in meaningful research, that develops the
researcher professionally, Koshy (2005). AR is a cyclical process, O’Leary (2004), as knowledge
emerges from research, so do new questions or new practices to try and the cycle begins all over
again but with ongoing developing awareness.
Figure 1: The Action Research cycle adapted from Kemmis & McTaggart (2005 p564)
For this research, the researcher is interested in how to make feedback more effective for students
with a view to transforming practice and for informing practice for colleagues. The initial cycle plan is
to use audio feedback as an alternative to written feedback and to observe the impact for both myself
as tutor and for the students and to evaluate and critically reflect on the process to inform how to
approach feedback during the next cycle of research.
5. Research method and data collection
For this research the tutor and students were engaged in the process from the outset, students were
informed in advance that personal feedback would be online via a digital audio file and that transcripts
of the audio would be available to anyone who required it. During initial discussions students
confirmed that they had never tried this method before and normally received traditional written
feedback. The turnaround for the project was swift, the assessment was due in mid-Nov and the
audio feedback needed to be available to students early in December. Due to time limitations, data
gathering was done via classroom discussion, an online survey and through evaluation of the number
of times feedback was accessed on the VLE. O’Leary (2005) recommends undertaking a pilot before
258