Blog #4 Are you Listening?

Lunt, Tom & John Curran. "'Are you listening please?' The advantages of electronic audio feedback compared to written feedback." Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. 35.7 (2010): 759-769. Web. 1 June 2012.

The authors in this article argue that audio feedback may be a solution to the problem seen in written feedback of a lack of timely, frequent and quality feedback. They begin by explaining that the study was conducted in light of the 2008 National Union of Students (NUS) Survey that reported students being unhappy with the timeliness and quality of the feedback from their instructors. The literature review in this study emphasizes that the research shows that both the grade and the comments affect the levels of student motivation.

In order to examine this issue, the researchers analyze where the instructors give formative and summative feedback in the form of handwritten, typed and audio comments. The researchers found that the audio feedback was by far the fastest and most effective way to deliver the feedback to students not only because of the speed that audio feedback allows (roughly 1 minute of audio = 6 minutes of writing), but also because of the ease of access to students. Additionally, the article states that the instructors found the technology (Audacity) easy to download and use.

Most important to this study was the student perceptions of the feedback. The researchers found that students responded positively to the use of audio feedback with more than 75% agreeing or strongly agreeing to all statements on the survey, which consisted of a Likert scale with the following statements: the audio feedback helped them see what they had left out, helped them see what they could improve on, was easy to access, was more helpful than the written forms of feedback received in the past, and is how they would like to receive all future feedback.

Finally, the authors conclude that the audio feedback given was more detailed and more direct than the written comments. “…Student 12 says ‘It was a personal address to me and my coursework, quite like sitting in John’s office and getting him to explain what I need to do’” (764). The researchers did acknowledge that the student results could be in response to the low quality of previous feedback and that accommodations would have to be made for the deaf and hard of hearing. However, overall, audio feedback is seen as beneficial to both the instructor and student.

This article is useful to all writing instructors, but is particularly helpful to the instructor that teaches asynchronously. In an asynchronous course, much of the feedback given is in regard to assignments that, if teaching a f2f course, would be given orally during class time. This does cause an increase in written comments when teaching an asynchronous distance course. The audio feedback option seems to be both easy to use and more “efficient;” however, the important part of the article is the student reactions to this type of feedback. If using in an asynchronous writing course, it would be beneficial to also survey students throughout the course to see if it’s as helpful to them as it was to these two courses of students.