Technology-Enhanced Assessment Feedback

Abstract

The rapid development of technology provides both challenges and opportunities for educators. Opportunities because there are new ways of interacting with students and achieving scalability and challenges to ensure the technology is constructively aligned with principles of good practice. To determine whether technology-enhanced feedback is valuable, it is important to evaluate it against established good practice. One framework which effectively integrates good practice principles into a process model is the Dialogic Feedback Cycle (DFC) (Beaumont, O’Doherty, & Shannon, Stud Higher Educ 36(6):1–17, 2011) which considers the feedback process in three stages: preparatory guidance, in-task guidance and performance feedback. A key element of the model is timely formative dialogue with the student about their work to clarify good performance, model self-assessment and enhance motivation. This chapter identifies good practice in assessment feedback and then discusses various forms of technology-enhanced feedback at each stage of the Dialogic Feedback Cycle (DFC) together with their potential for scalability. These include approaches to build students’ assessment literacy and engagement in large classes and a novel intelligent tutoring system which conducts extended dialogue with students to develop metacognitive skills.