Using an Electronic Voting System to Promote Active Reflection on Coursework Feedback

Abstract: Many lecturers use coursework as the primary mechanism for providing students with feedback on their learning. However, against the models of Laurillard and Kolb which view learning as a cyclical process, they provide little or no scaffolding to support effective assimilation of the feedback by the students. This paper proposes a pedagogical script for using an electronic voting system (EVS) to promote the necessary assimilation, based on the generation of discussion found in Mazur's Peer Instruction method. The script's use in three case studies is described. Staff and students found the sessions beneficial over traditional remediation mechanisms. Over three-quarters of the final session was spent in students working on and discussing the misunderstandings apparent in their coursework. Feedback and reflection are essential to learning, and have been represented in many educational theories and frameworks. For example, Laurillard's dialogue model of learning (Laurillard, 2002) embodies feedback in the communications between the teacher and learner, and reflection on this feedback in their thought processes; Kolb's learning cycle (Kolb, 1984) depends on feedback and subsequent reflection generated from the results of actively working with the material under study; and collaborative learning (Matthews, 1996) depends on the interplay amongst learners and between teacher and learner, again embodying both feedback and reflection. These models view learning as a cyclic process, which may require many iterations of the communication, processing, feedback and reflection loop before the learning is successful.