Corrective feedback and its implications on students’ confidence-based assessment

Abstract

Students’ confidence about their knowledge may yield high or low discrepancy in contrast to actual performance. Therefore, investigating students’ behavior towards corrective feedback (received after answering a question) becomes of particular interest. We conducted three experimental sessions with 94 undergraduate students using a computer-based assessment system wherein students specified confidence level (as high or low) with each submitted response. This research study exploits their logged data to provide analyses of: (1) students’ behaviors towards corrective feedback in relation to their confidence (about his/her answers), and, (2) impact of seeking corrective feedback on student’s subsequent attempt. In conformance with previous studies, we determine that students tend to overestimate their abilities. Data analysis also shows a significant difference infv students’ feedback seeking behavior with respect to distinct confidence-outcome categories. Interestingly, feedback seeking was predicted by (student) response’s outcome irrespective of its related confidence level, whereas, feedback reading time shows dependency on the confidence level. Our most important finding is that feedback seeking behavior shows a positive impact on students’ confidence-outcome category in the next attempt. Different possibilities for utilizing these results for future work and supporting adaptation based on students’ needs are discussed in the conclusions.