December 21st, 2009 by Steve Bond | 1 Comment »
A Word in your Ear was an excellent one-day conference on the use of audio feedback (AF) in higher education.
The keynote was by Bob Rotherham, who as leader of the JISC/Leeds Metropolitan project Sounds Good, has become the go-to man for AF for the UK. I was already familiar with the Sounds Good outputs, but it’s the way he says it that makes the difference. A really good, engaging, no-nonsense speaker. Bob tried to move the agenda on by pointing out that we all know now that most students like AF – it’s been demonstrated time and time again – but we don’t know whether it is actually more educationally effective than written feedback. Unfortunately I didn’t get the sense that any of the other presenters were trying to answer this question, or even proposing ways in which it might be answered.
In the first session, Patricia Fell from Birmingham City University reported on a small case-study – too small to draw broad conclusions, but interesting in the questions that it raised. For example, the one student who didn’t like AF found it so off-putting that they felt unable to even listen to it, thus depriving themselves of any feedback at all. In questions afterwards, Phil Ice commented that there may be cultural factors that make certain groups of students less receptive to AF.
Sue Rodway-Dyer from Exeter University then presented a really excellent piece of research on the use of AF with first-year geographers. I seldom see research this thorough at learning technology conferences. AF had been given to 73 students on a piece of coursework, and student attitudes evaluated by means of questionnaires at the time they received the feedback, further follow-up questions by email later, focus groups, and a final, surprise questionnaire at the start of their second year which sought to determine how their opinions had changed over time, how they felt their performance in later coursework had been changed, and how much of the feedback they recalled. This last question was particularly revealing, with some students able to reproduce verbatim whole sections of the AF they had received. Furthermore, the researchers conducted ‘stimulated recall’ sessions with the lecturer, where they played selected extracts from the lecturer’s own recordings, and asked them to comment. This allowed lecturers to reflect on their approach to giving AF and point out what they would do differently next time.
Next up was the ‘Challenge Circle’. At the start of the conference we had been asked to write down a ‘challenge’ facing us in the use of AF, stick it on a board, and these would then form the basis of discussion. In our group we discussed “how do we make AF dialogic?” and “has AF improved grades or outcomes?”. These sounded promising but neither question was really addressed properly. Some interesting things came up anyway. Anne Nortcliffe from Sheffield Hallam advocated recording face-to-face sessions with students, and further, putting the responsibility for recording them onto the student themselves. Recording and dissemination of peer discussions was also mooted.
Phil Ice from the American Public University was next, giving some very quantitative results from a long-term study involving over 1000 students. He appears to have refuted the ‘novelty effect’, showing that students retain enthusiasm for AF into their second year of using it. His study showed that students preferred different types of feedback at different levels of detail: audio feedback for broad, overall themes; a mixture of audio and written for mid-level feedback about specific arguments in the text; and written feedback for detailed feedback such as grammatical corrections and citation styles. He also mentioned that US law requires the archiving of up to 7 years’ worth of student material – so far they have about 8 TB of audio data stored and indexed so that it can be retrieved easily!
Next up, Gabi Witthaus of Leicester University spoke on the language of AF as compared to written feedback. AF is characterised by much greater informality and colloquialism, but especially so when the feedback is positive. Teachers giving negative feedback seem to retreat into more formal language to deliver the bad news. There was also evidence of a more ‘sharing’ approach, for example where a teacher criticises a piece of work by explaining how they once made the same mistake.
The final session of the day was a student panel, where 4 students spoke about their own experience of receiving audio feedback and of their impressions of the conference. I am a big fan of giving students a voice at these events, and this was a good panel. It felt like a bit of a cheat though, because the students concerned were doing a course in education, so were actually using audio feedback themselves. They were clearly advocates of it from an educator’s point of view, rather than necessarily being so from the student point of view. A key theme that emerged from the panel was that of the students’ initial scepticism being overcome – both concerning audio feedback and peer feedback.
Overall, a thoroughly worthwhile trip to Sheffield.
Posted in Audio, CLTNews, Conferences
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