Supporting Face-to-Face Like Communication Modalities for Asynchronous Assignment Feedback in Math Education

Abstract

The digitization of educational course content has proved to be problematic for math instructors due to the lack of quality feedback tools that can accommodate the commenter to efficiently express math formulae and convey descriptions about complex ideas contextualized in situ. This paper proposes that RichReview, a document annotation system which creates inking, voice and deictic gestures on top of the student's submitted work, is a possible formative math feedback solution, because it enables face-to-face like commentary within the contexts of the document at hand. A preliminary qualitative evaluation study conducted while having students receive RichReview feedback showed promise to our approach to enhance the quality of feedback, with the implication that incorporating multi-modal feedback into workflows can be an effective method to address elements of feedback submissions lacking in coursework that has moved online.