Electronic vs Handwritten Feedback

Colleagues, this week we would like to share a recent paper, entitled, “Does Mechanism Matter? Student Recall of Electronic versus Handwritten Feedback”.

In this paper, the authors examine how the mechanism of transmission may impact student retention of feedback content. They state the premise that such retention is necessary for feedback to function as a component of formative assessment. The research found that students who received handwritten feedback could recall more feedback (quantity); and those who received electronic feedback recalled the comments more accurately (quality). A total of 34 undergraduate students participated, thirteen from Political Science courses and 21 from Psychology courses, so a range of majors we

re represented. Not surprisingly, the more carefully students read the feedback, the more they encoded the feedback accurately.

Osterbur, M., Hammer, E., & Hammer, E. (2015) Does Mechanism Matter? Student Recall of Electronic versus Handwritten Feedback. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 9 (1).