Firstly, written feedback is expensive, and at a time when the university wants to cut costs, it makes sense to look at whether feedback can be optimised by involving the students and letting them give each other feedback, says Bente Mosgaard Jørgensen.

She also says that, even though the students want feedback, the lecturers’ carefully written feedback often goes to waste.

“The latest study of the AU study environment showed that only 40 per cent of students said they received good feedback, while 51 per cent thought that the feedback they received wasn’t satisfactory. In other words: It was no use to them.”

Feedback as transmission

In her research, Bente Mosgaard Jørgensen will therefore map the differences between the objectives and effectiveness of traditional written feedback and of peer feedback, where the students give each other feedback based on instructions from the lecturer. Bente Mosgaard Jørgensen is looking at the two different types of feedback as two different types of communication.

Traditional written feedback falls under what those in the world of communication term the transmission paradigm. In other words, the information is passed on from a sender to a receiver, and it is simply assumed that the recipient understands the information in the spirit in which it is given.

“It is an cognitive approach, which is based on me believing that you have actually learned something because I have told it to you or provided it as written feedback,” explains Bente Mosgaard Jørgensen.

“But in fact, as a rule we don’t actually know whether this is so, because we lack access to the ways in which students work with our feedback. We don’t even know whether our input has been understood.”

Feedback as transaction

An alternative type of feedback is peer feedback, where students work together to provide each other with feedback.

“This is a constructivist way of thinking, where the knowledge that must result from the process arises through the students’ own involvement with the sources of information they have at their disposal. These include, for example, their own pre-existing knowledge and experience, the material they have received from their lecturer, and the ‘co-construction’ they have with each other,” says Bente Mosgaard Jørgensen.

She suggests that with peer feedback, the students play an active role and gradually learn to assess each other and develop a meta-cognitive awareness about their own learning. These are competencies they will need when leaving university and having to stand on their own two feet.

Benefits of traditional feedback

In feedback research, not a lot of interest has so far been shown in documenting the actual communication processes, but this is what Bent Mosgaard Jørgensen wants to do now. She is therefore looking for lecturers who would like to be part of her research project.

The project will comprise two parts.

Initially, Bente Mosgaard Jørgensen will look at traditional feedback where, together with a lecturer, she will attempt to describe and conceptualise the objectives of the feedback and the feedback methods. Why is it the way it is, and what does the lecturer expect of the students and how they use the feedback? This will be compared with interviews with the students, who will be asked to read the lecturer’s feedback out loud and comment on what they have derived from it.

“I would like to know what each student has understood, and what he or she intends to do next. I would also like to know how significant it is that the feedback comes from the lecturer rather than a fellow student, because research at Aarhus University shows that some types of students have less confidence in their fellow students during the learning process and prefer to hear the ‘solution’ directly from the lecturer,” says Bente Mosgaard Jørgensen.

Significance of peers for feedback quality

Her research also focuses on co-construction in the form of peer feedback to see what effect the involvement of peers has on the quality and nature of the feedback.

“We have an idea that this type of feedback results in better learning, and that it also reduces our workload and is therefore cheaper. But is that in fact the case?” asks Bente Mosgaard Jørgensen.

She therefore plans to visit the teaching facilities armed with a camera to observe how the students communicate about the feedback. She will then analyse these exchanges to see how the process results in learning. She is also hoping that she will be able to establish whether the students have developed academically.

This is a qualitative study, and thus the aim is not to arrive at any conclusion about whether one method is more effective than the other.

“However, the study will hopefully provide an insight into the significance of the actual communication process for the student’s learning outcome and the learning process,” says Bente Mosgaard Jørgensen.