Tailoring of feedback in online assessment: Lessons learnt

Feedback plays an important role in the learning process. Particularly, the functions of the elaborated feedback (EF) in online assessment may include assisting students in understanding their mistakes and misconceptions, motivating the student for further learning, suggesting directions for improvement, and others. During the academic years 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 we have conducted a series of online assessments of students (as integral parts of several bachelor and master courses) and have studied the possibilities of tailoring the feedback (presented to a student as a result of his/her response to questions of an online test) taking into account the individual learning styles (LS), certitude in a response and correctness of this response. In this paper we summarize our major findings from the assessments data and lessons learnt from the organization of online assessments with tailored feedback. We also discuss the advantages and limitations of our studies, and outline the prominent directions for further research