Instructors’ Perspectives of Challenges and Barriers to Providing Effective Feedback

Instructor perspectives regarding the challenges they experience in enacting effective feedback processes have not been the focus in the literature on effective feedback processes. This study investigated the challenges that instructors experienced in providing effective feedback to students between January and April 2020, particularly considering campus closures and the shift to online learning in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This study consisted of six focus groups held between January and April 2020 with five instructors from different disciplines at the same institution with class sizes ranging from 14 to 82. Through a thematic analysis using a constant comparison method, it was found that the biggest challenges instructors experienced in providing effective feedback was their own workload, the disruption that student inaction on feedback brought to the feedback process, and how the instructors managed their own affective responses and mindsets towards feedback. These findings are discussed within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and based on these findings, recommendations for instructors include considering their own limitations when designing feedback processes and checking their beliefs about feedback with their students’ perspectives on feedback in order to align understanding.

Applying Salutogenesis in the Workplace

This chapter presents models, measures, and intervention approaches that relate to the double nature of work and its salutogenic quality. Hereby, the view of Aaron Antonovsky is enhanced insofar that health-promoting, salutogenic job characteristics are not solely understood as mitigating the pathogenic effects of stressors at work but have a distinct effect on positive health outcomes. In the chapter, Antonovsky’s original model is first specified and simplified for the context of work. Next, Antonovsky’s line of thinking is related to frameworks researching job resources and demands. After a review of the prevalence of salutogenic measures in worksite health promotion, the point of making salutogenesis more visible in work-related research and practice is elaborated. This is illustrated with a practical example of a survey-feedback process promoting salutogenic work.

Artificial intelligence in constructing personalized and accurate feedback systems for students

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have evolved with digital learning developments to provide thriving soft groups with digital opportunities in response to feedback. When it comes to learning environments, educators’ training feedback is often used as a response recourse. Through the use of final evaluations, students receive feedback that improves their education abilities. To improve academic achievement and explore knowledge in the learning process, this section provides an AI-assisted personalized feedback system (AI-PFS). An individualized feedback system is implemented to learn more about the student’s lack of academic experience interactivity and different collaboration behaviors. According to their benchmark, PFS aims to establish a personalized and reliable feedback process for each class based on their collaborative process and learn analytics modules. It has been proposed to use multi-objective implementations to evaluate students regarding the learning results and teaching methods. With different series of questions sessions for students, AI-PFS has been designed, and the findings showed that it greatly enhances the performance rate of 95.32% with personalized and reasonable predictive.

Identifying the dynamic evolution and feedback process of water resources nexus system considering socioeconomic development, ecological protection, and food security: A practical tool for sustainable water use

The accelerated consumption of water resources caused by the rapid increase in population and urbanization is intensifying the complex interactions across water resources, socioeconomic development, ecological protection, and food security (WSEF), which causes not only the imbalance between water supply and demand but also the vulnerability of both food and ecological systems. Therefore, identifying the dynamic coevolution and feedback process is one of the most crucial ways of achieving the goal of sustainable water use. In this study, we developed an integrated modeling framework to better identify the dynamic interaction and coevolution process of the nexus across WSEF systems in the context of sustainable water uses by coupling system dynamic (SD) model and multi-objective optimization model. The SD model is used to simulate both the dynamic interaction of each agent and the coevolution process of the whole nexus system by positive/negative feedback loops. The multi-objective optimization model is used to quantify the negative feedback loops of the SD model by generating the optimal scheme of different water users. Finally, the model uncertainty considering different weighting factors is analyzed. The framework is applied to the upper reaches of the Guijiang River basin, China. Results show that (i) the rapid economic growth increases the conflict between the water uses for socioeconomic development and ecological protection, intensifying the ecological awareness and resulting in more water shortages of socioeconomic and food agents, which is unable to support such rapid development. (ii) Once the economic growth rate decreases, water resources are able to support economic development with a decreased overload index and stable crop yield, which further contributes to water sustainability. (iii) The river ecological agent is the critical factor that affects the robustness of the model. (iv) The equal consideration of each water usage is the most beneficial to sustainable development. These results highlight the importance of water resources management, considering the tradeoffs across multiple stakeholders, and give a strong reference to policymakers for comprehensive urban planning.

Quantifying the Endogeneity in Online Donations

Charitable crowdfunding provides a new channel for people and families suffering from unforeseen events, such as accidents, severe illness, and so on, to seek help from the public. Thus, finding the key determinants which drive the fundraising process of crowdfunding campaigns is of great importance, especially for those suffering. With a unique data set containing 210,907 crowdfunding projects covering a period from October 2015 to June 2020, from a famous charitable crowdfunding platform, specifically Qingsong Chou, we will reveal how many online donations are due to endogeneity, referring to the positive feedback process of attracting more people to donate through broadcasting campaigns in social networks by donors. For this aim, we calibrate three different Hawkes processes to the event data of online donations for each crowdfunding campaign on each day, which allows us to estimate the branching ratio, a measure of endogeneity. It is found that the online fundraising process works in a sub-critical state and nearly 70–90% of the online donations are endogenous. Furthermore, even though the fundraising amount, number of donations, and number of donors decrease rapidly after the crowdfunding project is created, the measure of endogeneity remains stable during the entire lifetime of crowdfunding projects. Our results not only deepen our understanding of online fundraising dynamics but also provide a quantitative framework to disentangle the endogenous and exogenous dynamics in complex systems.

The Use of Video Annotation in Education: A Review

Video annotation (VA), a tool which allows commentaries to be synchronized with video content has recently received significant research attention in education. However, the application contexts of these studies are varied and fragmented. A review was therefore undertaken with the objectives to find out the extent to which the use of VA has been explored for different instructional purposes and summarize the potential affordances of VA in supporting student learning. Articles related to the use of VA in education context were searched from 2011 to 2020 (Nov). Of the final 32 eligible studies, it was found that VA tools were used predominantly to develop teaching practices, enhance learners’ conceptual understanding of video content and develop workplace skills as well as clinical practices. Five most dominant educational affordances of VA tools were summarized as follows: (1) facilitating learners’ reflection (2) facilitating feedback process (3) enhancing comprehension of video content (4) promoting students’ learning satisfaction and positive attitude and (5) convenience and ease. With the outstanding weight of research evidence gained on educational affordances offered by VA, it is convincing that advancing the use of VA in education can further expand the learning opportunities in 21st century classrooms. Keywords: Affordances, Education, Feedback, Learners’ reflection, Video annotation

Implementing an Anonymous Closed-Loop Feedback Process and Associations With ACGME Annual Survey Scores in a Family Medicine Residency

Background and Objectives: The annual Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) survey evaluates numerous variables, including resident satisfaction with the training program. We postulated that an anonymous system allowing residents to regularly express and discuss concerns would result in higher ACGME survey scores in areas pertaining to program satisfaction. Methods: One family medicine residency program implemented a process of quarterly anonymous closed-loop resident feedback and discussion in academic year 2012-2013. Data were tracked longitudinally from the 2011-2019 annual ACGME resident surveys, using academic year 2011-2012 as a baseline control. Results: For the survey item “Satisfied that evaluations of program are confidential,” years 2013-2014, 2014-2015, and 2018-2019 showed a significantly higher change from baseline. For “Satisfied that program uses evaluations to improve,” year 2018-2019 had a significantly higher percentage change from baseline. For “Satisfied with process to deal with problems and concerns,” year 2018-2019 showed significantly higher change. For “Residents can raise concerns without fear,” years 2013-2014 and 2018-2019 saw significantly higher changes. Conclusions: These results suggest that this feedback process is perceived by residents as both confidential and promoting a culture of safety in providing feedback. Smaller changes were seen in residents’ belief that the program uses evaluations to improve, and in satisfaction with the process to deal with problems and concerns.

A Study on the Teaching Method for Academic Writing through Interactive Feedback

Interactive feedback refers not to the unidirectional feedback given by a professor, but rather to responsive feedback is provided as response the student’s self statement on their own writing, regarding his or her their intentions as an author and their writing process. It allows students to accept feedback as conversation and communication with readers within the academic community, rather than as a modification demand or justification of evaluation from the professor. Students can experience feedback request and constructive application of the feedback in their writing as a useful writing strategy. Professors also can provide effective and efficient writing guidance and advice by identifying their students’ writing intentions and concerns in advance. This study examined the theory and overseas examples of practiced interactive feedback, constructed post-writing activities and feedback process that can be implemented in class, and then demonstrated them in writing courses of university. As a result, this study confirmed that students experience the writing process in a more communicative manner through interactive feedback.

The Statistical Analysis of Multidimensional Psychological Characteristics and User Feedback Willingness

The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of multidimensional psychological characteristics on users’ feedback intention by using several statistical analysis methods based on information theory. The feedback process can be described as a communication process based on information theory. The feedback information entropy is associated with the degree of uncertainty elimination of the users who provide feedback information. Many factors are related to this uncertainty, such as information senders often stopped feedback process for some reasons and information senders may have provided fake or spam information. In order to encourage more useful feedback information, a model of a user’s willingness to provide feedback was established with personality traits and cognitive styles as independent variables, feedback motivation as intermediary variables, and feedback willingness as the dependent variable. 206 online and offline questionnaires were obtained to be analyzed by correlation analysis, regression analysis, and structural equation analysis. Cronbach’s α coefficient was used to test the reliability of the questionnaire, and exploratory factor analysis method was used to verify the validity of the questionnaire. First, correlation analysis was used to explore the correlation between personality traits, cognitive styles, and motivation factors. Second, we further explored the strength of the relationship of the five correlated groups of variables through linear regression analysis. At last, we conducted structure equation analyses to test the hypotheses. The results show that both personality traits and cognitive styles can have a significant impact on feedback motivation factors and also show that self-efficacy may be the only evident feedback motivation to encourage useful feedback information. The results show that the willing users with extraversion trait are more likely be motivated by self-efficacy and thus have evident feedback willingness.