Pulling all the pedagogic pieces together to provide good electronic feedback: an example from science education

The aim of Nefreduca project was to develop digital science materials for chronically ill children and to assist them to cope more rationally with their illness. The Nefreduca system was developed in 2 stages.The first was a teaching-learning sequence about nutrition and kidney function, which was tested with the students and their teachers from the hospital school. The second phase was the construction of an automatic feedback system for Nefreduca. This paper reports the findings from both phases and makes the case that good feedback models must build upon on a good learning design that addresses students' misconceptions and introduces well structured e-activitie

Modelling the teachers' feedback process for the design of an electronic interactive science tool with automatic feedback

This paper models the feedback teachers give to students who are using an interactive computer tutorial (Nefreduca) to help them understand key biological concepts related to the kidney. Nefreduca consists of a series of open source science inquiry based web learning materials targeted at children with chronic kidney disease. It utilises a scenario based approach drawing on the work of Lijnse (1995) and Buty, Tiberghien & Le Marechal (2004). The hospital teachers who assisted the children with their use of Nefreduca reported learning gains with the system but there is no automatic feedback for autonomous learning with Nefreduca when children are unsupported by a teacher. An ethnographic approach was adopted to then understand how teachers provided feedback to the students in order to devise a model of supportive feedback to the chronically ill students, which can be implemented in the next version of Nefreduca