Are Students Reading their Teachers’ Comments? The Impact of Digital Feedback in Adult Learning Secondary Education

This paper shows the results of an ongoing research which explores the impact of digital feedback in adult learning at the Institut Obert de Catalunya (IOC), an online public school (Department of Education of Catalonia, Spain). The students are adults who did not obtain a degree in compulsory secondary education at the time. The objective of these studies is twofold: to teach students basic life skills they should know to survive and thrive in nowadays society and to manage lifelong learning. Within this context, feedback plays an important role as it has a huge influence on students’ learning gain. However, are students taking advantage of the teachers’ feedback to improve their tasks? The research is based on the assessments made by students of their teachers’ feedback comments and the improvement those meant in the students’ task completions. Our intention was to prove from the statements made by the students two facts: if the students received feedback effectively and if that resulted in an improvement in their task completions. Seven closed-ended multiple choice questions together with an open-ended one were used to carry out this survey. The first set of questions were used to gather insight about the students’ opinions on the effectivity of the feedback regarding content value, extension and clarity of message. With the open question, we tested how much information the students had retained form their teachers’ feedback messages, and what aspects of it they considered more relevant. These first findings provide new insight into the relation between digital feedback and its impact on academic results.