Tailoring feedback in online assessment: Influence of learning styles on the feedback preferences and elaborated feedback effectiveness

Design of feedback is a critical issue of online assessment development within Web-based Learning Systems (WBLSs). This paper examines the potential possibilities of tailoring the feedback that is presented to a student as a result of his/her preferences and responses to questions of an online test with respect to the individual learning styles (LS). The paper briefly reviews the main types of feedback that can be presented during online assessment and discusses the challenges in authoring and tailoring of feedback in WBLSs. We report the results of some recent experiments organized as online assessment of students through multiple-choice quizzes in which students were able to request different kinds of feedback for the answered questions. The experimental results have confirmed that LS have a significant influence on (1) the feedback preferences (with regard to response certitude and correctness) of students and (2) the effectiveness of elaborated feedback (EF), i.e. improving studentspsila performance during the test