Design and Evaluation of an IT-based Formative Feedback Tool to Foster Student Performance

Today’s world is changing faster than ever before. Students need to constantly acquire new knowledge and the required skills shift more and more to higher order thinking skills. One major approach to support the students in this shift is through formative feedback, which initiates self-regulated learning processes. However, given the constant rise of student numbers while public spending remains constant, one of the major challenges is how to effectively provide formative feedback in large-scale lectures. The aim of our project is to develop an IT-tool which provides students with formative feedback to increase their performance in large-scale lectures. Our results show that through the use of the IT-tool the objective and perceived student performance can be significantly increased. By documenting our design knowledge according to the eight components of Gregor and Jones (2007), we take a first step towards creating a design theory for formative feedback tools.