Investigating shareable feedback tags for programming assignments

This article presents an investigation into the usage of shareable feedback tags as a way of delivering feedback to three different cohorts of programming students. A series of research questions are examined; these include investigating any perceived benefit from students using feedback tags and exploring how students interact with their feedback. Results indicate that students with both the lower and higher marks in a cohort are more likely to opt to share their feedback and programming work than students with mid-ranged marks. A variety of reasons, both for and against sharing, given by students are discussed. Six categories of student behaviour exhibited during interaction with their feedback have been identified in this article. This article has shown that feedback tags can be used successfully as a form of shareable feedback and that a number of future research possibilities exist that can extend this topic