From text to audiovisual feedback: enhancing clarity, usefulness and satisfaction

Research demonstrates that students generally find digitally recorded assessment feedback comments to be more satisfying than text-based feedback comments. However, positive perceptions of digitally recorded feedback may be impacted by the confidence and experience of the educator who is providing the comments. As such, this paper reports on an exploratory study in which we compare students’ perceptions of the text-based and digitally recorded feedback created by five tutors in the same subject. Survey data were collected from 81 students, of which 58 received text-based and 23 received digitally recorded feedback comments. Students who received digitally recorded feedback comments provided consistently higher ratings for feedback clarity, usefulness, and satisfaction than students who received text-based feedback comments. It is proposed that the media enables these effects, but the structure of the feedback design is also important.