Oral Presentation Australian Society for Microbiology Annual Scientific Meeting 2017

Video Assessment and Feedback – upscaling student feedback in Science Education (#89)

Jack Wang 1
  1. University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Undergraduate science students primarily learn through activities and assessment tasks designed to achieve economies of scale across large class sizes. Face-to-face student feedback for assessment tasks is crucial to foster student learning, yet opportunities to do so are greatly constrained by class size and available resources.  To bridge the gap between students and instructors, this project investigated the impact of delivering individualised feedback to students in the form of short instructor videos in large science courses. UQ science students enrolled in second and third-level coursework from 2015-2017 were introduced to video feedback for assessment items ranging from hands-on laboratory work to written scientific reports, and their interactions with the instructor videos were measured using learning analytics.  ~50% of student cohort watched the videos, and their video viewing activity was correlated to the content of instructor feedback.  Student consistently engaged with their feedback videos across different assessment tasks, and exhibited similar pausing and scrubbing frequency across videos created by new and experienced instructors alike. Pre and post student surveys and interviews revealed an improvement in student perceptions on the usefulness of video feedback, and together this data suggests a new instructor feedback tool for use in large classes.