Feedback techniques for project-based courses

Abstract

Feedback is important for student learning, yet many instructors are rightly concerned about the time they spend giving feedback, especially if they cannot tell whether it is used or ignored by the students. Similarly, instructors can benefit from student feedback, yet to achieve this, effective mechanisms for collecting useful feedback are needed. This paper sheds light on how to choose feedback mechanisms for a course. We base our analysis upon experiences with the many feedback techniques we use in an undergraduate software engineering course where students learn about team and project work. Another contribution is the experience report on a variety of techniques we have tried where feedback came from different sources (the student's own introspection, the instructors, peer students, domain experts, and project artifacts), in different forms (verbal, written, automatic indicators, etc.), and within different contexts (time, frequency, phrasing, etc.). For each technique, we discuss its goals and requirements, and analyze how students and instructors perceived its costs and benefits. We find that feedback that is grounded, unbiased, timely, frequent, and easy to assess tends to work better for students and educators, so we evaluate each covered technique against a set of such desirable qualities. This type of information can be especially useful for educators planning new courses, as they try to produce low-cost, high-quality feedback that students will listen to and can understand, and as they need corresponding feedback mechanisms that support a variety of learning styles and are easy to use.