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.