Supporting understanding of students’ learning via visual self-assessment

Abstract

Understanding students’ learning is crucial to the development of teaching. The most common systematic approach to understanding students’ learning has been summative course feedback, gathered after each course. However, students do not seem to be motivated to give this summative feedback after courses, with answer rates as low as 30 percent at Aalto University. Based on our observations, this is partly due to the timing and quality of current methods: students do not themselves benefit from any possible developments to the course. We soon realised that we merely need to develop a more dynamic culture of giving feedback during a course and started a project called Dynamic Course and Programme Level Feedback. We use a concept mapping tool to collect data from students during a course. This data is then visualised as dashboards that serve as feedback for teachers and enable adaptive teaching.