Improving Student Performance Through Enhanced Feedback

A first year core marketing module (300 students) suffered from a lack of engagement by students outside of the ‘lecture’ environment, limited opportunity for formative feedback, poor student evaluation of feedback and weak achievement in summative assessment. A number of changes were made to a first year core marketing module to see if an increase in formative feedback, facilitated by increased student engagement would increase achievement. These included; removing the ‘lecture’ content and replacing it with narrated Powerpoint presentations on-line; requiring students to prepare 6 discussion papers in advance of teaching sessions which were then peer reviewed, discussed in class and an anonymised sample being lecturer reviewed in detail and posted on-line; teaching sessions also utilised a series of quizzes based on ‘lecture’ content, which were done as group activities along with a series of other group tasks that involved apply knowledge and presenting results that were then responded to by staff.