Abstract
Students’ confidence about their knowledge may yield high or low discrepancy in contrast to actual performance. Therefore, investigating students’ behavior towards corrective feedback (received after answering a question) becomes of particular interest. We conducted three experimental sessions with 94 undergraduate students using a computer-based assessment system wherein students specified confidence level (as high or low) with each submitted response. This research study exploits their logged data to provide analyses of: (1) students’ behaviors towards corrective feedback in relation to their confidence (about his/her answers), and, (2) impact of seeking corrective feedback on student’s subsequent attempt. In conformance with previous studies, we determine that students tend to overestimate their abilities. Data analysis also shows a significant difference infv students’ feedback seeking behavior with respect to distinct confidence-outcome categories. Interestingly, feedback seeking was predicted by (student) response’s outcome irrespective of its related confidence level, whereas, feedback reading time shows dependency on the confidence level. Our most important finding is that feedback seeking behavior shows a positive impact on students’ confidence-outcome category in the next attempt. Different possibilities for utilizing these results for future work and supporting adaptation based on students’ needs are discussed in the conclusions.
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Notes
- 1.
Task-level feedback allowing students to fill knowledge gap(s) in one’s understanding of subject material. Discussed in more detail in the next section.
- 2.
Also referred as certitude level in the literature (e.g. in [14]).
- 3.
We used binary measure in this work for simplicity. However, other measures may also be used to collect students’ rating of their confidence level, e.g., a likert scale, percentages, etc.
- 4.
Alternative terminologies are available in the literature. For example, [3] distinguished these knowledge regions as: uninformed (wrong answer with low confidence); doubt (correct answer with low confidence); misinformed (wrong answer with high confidence); and, mastery (correct answer with high confidence).
- 5.
This should not be confused with questions’ difficulty levels.
- 6.
Developed by a team of three students from NUCES-CFD (Pakistan), under the supervision of the principal investigator of this research study.
- 7.
As uploaded by the instructor.
- 8.
By the principal investigator of this research study.
- 9.
We avoided textual explanation of the correct solution and instead highlighted student’s error(s) for easy comparison with the correct solution.
- 10.
Note that some students did not submit solutions of all 18 problems.
- 11.
Total sessions - sessions with zero feedback seek (\(231 - 26 = 205\)).
- 12.
As the data is shown in logarithmic scale for better visualization, thus, the slight increase in median of HCWR should not be ignored.
- 13.
To analyze the impact of feedback on performance attributes in the next attempt, we removed first problem solved per ‘Login-Logout’ session from the original dataset (N = 1157, total sessions = 231), as it has no ancestor variable to observe; this leaves us with 926 records.
- 14.
Leave aside students’ personal characteristics for a moment; which may affect their feedback reading time: motivation, reading speed, etc., as discussed in [13].
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Acknowledgments
We are thankful for the support and contribution of Mr. Abdul Wahab (Instructor at NUCES CFD campus, Pakistan) and his students who participated in this experimental study.
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Maqsood, R., Ceravolo, P. (2019). Corrective Feedback and Its Implications on Students’ Confidence-Based Assessment. In: Draaijer, S., Joosten-ten Brinke, D., Ras, E. (eds) Technology Enhanced Assessment. TEA 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1014. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25264-9_5
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