Learner-centred Analytics of Feedback Content in Higher Education

Abstract

Feedback is an effective way to assist students in achieving learning goals. The conceptualisation of feedback is gradually moving from feedback as information to feedback as a learner-centred process. To demonstrate feedback effectiveness, feedback as a learner-centred process should be designed to provide quality feedback content and promote student learning outcomes on the subsequent task. However, it remains unclear how instructors adopt the learner-centred feedback framework for feedback provision in the teaching practice. Thus, our study made use of a comprehensive learner-centred feedback framework to analyse feedback content and identify the characteristics of feedback content among student groups with different performance changes. Specifically, we collected the instructors' feedback on two consecutive assignments offered by an introductory to data science course at the postgraduate level. On the basis of the first assignment, we used the status of student grade changes (i.e., students whose performance increased and those whose performance did not increase on the second assignment) as the proxy of the student learning outcomes. Then, we engineered and extracted features from the feedback content on the first assignment using a learner-centred feedback framework and further examined the differences of these features between different groups of student learning outcomes. Lastly, we used the features to predict student learning outcomes by using widely-used machine learning models and provided the interpretation of predicted results by using the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) framework. We found that 1) most features from the feedback content presented significant differences between the groups of student learning outcomes, 2) the gradient boost tree model could effectively predict student learning outcomes, and 3) SHAP could transparently interpret the feature importance on predictions.