Guía de evaluación del módulo Maquinado de piezas con torno

Two participants from my module group received audio, or podcast feedback in addition to written feedback. The audio recordings were transcribed and analysed for comparison with the written feedback. It is important to note that these two samples allow only limited scope for generalization, but results can be compared with

findings in the literature. They are important for the experience of the participants in the study but also for an indication of the nature of the feedback that such

technological responses can provide. Table 7.3 shows how comments were relatively evenly spread for both students. What stands out is the overall number of comments in this mode of delivery, with over twenty audio feedback comments for both participants, compared with an average of 7.5 written end comments for the sample of students as a whole. The higher incidence of audio comments as opposed to written feedback comments is also seen in figures 7.4 and 7.5, where each student’s results are charted.

Table 7:4 Audio feedback

Not all types of comment were more frequent in the audio feedback, however. For both participants there were more developmental alternatives in written than audio feedback. Comments in the critical analysis category were more than double for Clara in her audio feedback, but Diane, on the other hand, received two fewer CA comments in her podcast feedback.

Type of comment Clara Diane

Phatic 3 3

Developmental alternatives 2 1 Developmental future 2 2

Structure 2 3

Language and expression 2 6 Reference and Source use 2 2

Positive content 4 4 Negative content 3 - Critical analysis 8 4 Explanation 10 16 Total comments 28 34 Total words 860 800

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Figure 7-5 Clara - written versus audio feedback comments

The number of explanations stands out in both sets of audio feedback:

between a third and a quarter of all audio comments. A number of explanations were in some way re-stated, and were not counted as comments in their own right. In fact, points which explain or summarise in a re-statement of the explanation account for 448/860 words in Clara’s audio feedback, or approximately half of the spoken text, with a little less for Diane’s audio feedback where 350/800 words fell into this category. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 podcast written comments 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 audio comments written comments

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The more frequent developmental alternative comments in written feedback, suggested that less task-specific advice was given in podcast feedback on what could have been done to improve performance in the task. At the same time, the more frequent incidence of future developmental comments in the podcasts implied that feed forward was more evident in the audio feedback. Phatic comments that might promote a more personal connection with the student were more frequent in the audio feedback, which again also featured a much higher frequency of comments explaining earlier indicative comments. While there was a combined total for all participants of only ten explanation comments in written feedback, twenty six explanation comments were recorded for only two students in the audio feedback. Despite the fact that this very small sample does not allow for generalisations, it indicated a feed forward potential for audio feedback that written feedback did not seem to provide.

Perhaps the finding above also reflects the nature of audio feedback in that it provides a clear invitation to the tutor to go beyond the simple indication of errors to give explanations of the rationale behind comments. In these two samples, there was a significant recap element, so rather than overloading students with too many feedback points, the podcast feedback provided focused explanations that were not evident in the written feedback.

Much of the existing research on audio feedback is on student perceptions of such feedback rather than actual analysis of the content (Savin-Baden, 2010), but the higher frequency of phatic and explanation comments, added to the recapping function in these podcasts support findings for the conversational nature of podcast feedback (France & Ribchester, 2008; Savin-Baden, 2010). An example from Diane’s podcast illustrates this:

Tutor E: Often, ’this’ is used at the beginning of the sentence to refer back to some kind of phrase, almost the whole sentence, anything more than one word is possible with ‘this’. If you’re using ‘it’ to refer back it needs to be one noun, one word to put in its place. So watch for things like that and the big thing in terms of language for you is the use of ‘the’. You’re using ‘the’ when you’re talking about generalities, which are plurals, don’t

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put ‘the’ in front of those, you’re also using it in front of abstracts like ‘research’. When you talk about the abstract noun like ‘research’ in general terms, so ‘research has found that’, not ‘the research, we’re not specifying it yet. If you write ‘the research by McCarthy and Carter’, then you’re specifying it. So be careful with use of articles like that, it will help if you pick those up.

The personal conversational style is evident here and the encouraging tone of the comments also comes through, echoing earlier research findings (Ribchester & France, 2008) and it also connects with the value of personal response highlighted in the US composition literature (e.g., Reid, 1994; Straub, 1997).

Clara received more CA comments in her podcast feedback than her written feedback; a good example of such comments was the one below on supporting claims to avoid generalisations:

Tutor E: So, when you make any kind of claims and I’ll give you examples of this, you’re looking at things for example your claim that you make certainly on page 5 at the top, you make generalisations about adult learners. To take an example, it’s a good idea this because it is about context when you want to teach the kind of written and spoken grammar rules, but of course there are many different kinds of adult learners, you could have a group of adult learners who need to work, for example, who are doing an academic course-you wouldn’t teach spoken English, but if they’re working in a kind of business environment, if they’re doing English language for business but it’s more functional for work in a hotel for example, you might very much want to focus on it. So, I think you made a very big statement there which didn’t allow for other contexts and other situations and that’s where you’ve got to be careful.

By making reference to points in the student text, I was able to go into detail about how a specific claim could be qualified. Despite this explanation, it is significant that Clara felt it necessary to meet me to check her understanding of the feedback (see Section 8.4.4), a further indication of the way CAW poses problems for these international students, but perhaps also an indication that podcast feedback is not a substitute for discussion, though it can encourage dialogue around feedback.

The sheer number of words used above (165) to explain how to qualify claims in a particular context would be impractical in written feedback, but audio feedback makes such detailed explanations possible. The two examples given above show that audio feedback can engage with stylistic and language issues and perhaps

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more importantly with issues of criticality. Even given the small sample involved, the conclusion is that audio feedback, by its nature can be potentially richer than written feedback in feed forward for students37 and it may be a way of compensating for lack of face-to face dialogue (Jonsson, 2012).