Engaging Students in Feedback through Gameful Self-Assessment by Thanos Hatzapostolou

We all want students to engage with the feedback that we provide, since through feedback, students can understand what they did well, what they could have done better, and how to improve. However, it is often the case that students do not engage as much as they should in order to benefit from it. Diverse reasons have been reported in research articles for such student behavior with the leading reason being the grade.

In an effort to engage students in feedback, and/or to make students understand the quality of their submitted work, some teachers before giving out the marks, they ask students to review what they have submitted, and along with the feedback provided and the assessment criteria, to perform a self-assessment. In other words, we hope that by asking a student “what mark would you give yourself?”, they would pay attention to the feedback comments. While such self-assessment may really be beneficial, the setback is that there is no direct incentive/motivation for the students to really engage in such an activity. Finding a motivation and dressing up the same activity with gameful design can have a huge impact on student engagement with the feedback.

The incentive for students can be an opportunity to gain 5 more points (5%) on the mark that you have assigned to them. Ensuring the reliability of assessment within 5% is somewhat iffy anyway, and just these 5 points can really motivate students to do something. The gameful design is that if a student’s mark is within 5% of your mark, the higher of the two marks will count. This is a win-win situation for students as they have nothing to lose; only an opportunity to add five points to their mark. But in order to get these 5 points, they really have to pay attention to the feedback comments (and possibly also the assessment criteria and/or model answers).

The above gameful approach works best as a classroom activity (30 to 50 minutes depending on the size of the assessment) and it also works best for tests, quizzes and assessed labs. I used it twice in the previous semester (once for a quiz and another time for an assessed lab) and students were extremely engaged. In addition to students really paying attention to the feedback comments, I also found out that this approach is a win-win situation for me too. The reason is that most students are very strict and they undermark themselves. So when they get a mark higher than what they expected, they still feel good even if they didn’t get the +5 points. Of course, how the results are announced/displayed is important too. I chose to do the following and as you can see, most of the results of the game have a +X points:

In my experience, approximately 25% of the students manage to get bonus points (from +1 to +5), approximately 50% are within a 5% difference of the mark that I assign, and at least 70% of the students undermark themselves. Finally, approximately 15% of the students overmark themselves with more than 5% and these are the students that I call to my office to explain to them the difference in the marks.

A variation of the above to work with submitted practicals is to ask from students to self-assess their work before submitting it. You can ask students to complete a simple form in which they evaluate their work against the assessment criteria. Students would then have to think more deeply about what they are submitting. In addition, you will know what students think about their work while you are marking it, which allows much better feedback to be given. Of course, the +5% bonus would still apply.

In summary, a gameful self-assessment activity appears to engage students in the feedback process. 

Thanos Hatziapostolou

Senior Lecturer, Computer Science Department