Audio Feedback
Overview
Abigail Ball and Will Haywood have been piloting the use of audio to give detailed feedback without unduly increasing staff workloads. Students in the Centre for Teacher Education are offered the option of completing a formative assessment in their first term. While this provides students with an opportunity to get feedback and advice early on, particularly in regards to academic writing, it also poses the challenge of increasing staff workloads. In order to overcome this, Abigail and Will have introduced audio feedback. When assessing student work, staff first colour-code the document and then record their feedback using the colour-coding to refer to specific sections.
Using audio feedback reduces workloads without reducing the quality or detail of the feedback. It also demonstrates to the students, who are themselves teachers, an alternative form of feedback that they could use in their own teaching. It also makes the feedback more authentic and personable.
Will HaywoodLink opens in a new window, Centre for Teacher Education
Lesson plan
- Staff complete a training session on how to use Audacity. They are also provided with some guidelines on best practice.
- Students are offered the option to complete a formative assessment in the first term.
- Students submit the work on Tabula.
- Tutors colour-code the document and record audio feedback using Audacity. The audio feedback refers to the colour-coded sections of the document.
- Tutors upload the audio file to Tabula, where students can access it.
Tutor's observations
We realised that students interacted with the audio feedback quite differently. Some students listened to it multiple times, which is really great, while others listened to it once and that’s it. And then other students listened to it in public. We actually found that they were listening to it with someone else, their mum or their dad and things like that. So they were getting another person’s perspective on what was being said.
One of the other benefits was that you get inflection with it. Written feedback can be quite dry and sometimes if you’re going to write something quite negative about a piece of work, when it’s written it can come across quite harsh and people react to that. Whereas if it’s said quite nicely, it comes across as far less critical.
You have to be aware that not all students can work with audio feedback. Students with hearing impairments will probably require written feedback so we have had to make some adjustments in the last couple years.
When you’re writing academic feedback you want to get it as perfect as possible. But students are far more forgiving when it comes to audio feedback because it’s a person talking. And if you actually listen when you speak, you’ll find there’s ums and ahs and all that kind of stuff and that’s fine, because [the students] are getting a more authentic conversation.
More Information
Find out from about using audio for teaching hereLink opens in a new window.
Links to more like this
Categories: Authentic assessment, Efficient learning management
Tools: Audacity
Departments: Centre for Teacher Education, Centre for Teacher Education