Improving the Learning Experience within MCAD Education: The Provision of Feedback on CAD Model Quality and Dormant Deficiency in Real-Time

Formative assessment is an important element for supporting any learning process, with the provision of feedback being one of its most effective strategies. However, despite the extensive body of research on feedback and its importance to learning, its effectiveness and usefulness, and thus its expected effect, are not always guaranteed. This, in part, can be attributed to issues concerning how students make sense of and act upon feedback and the gap between how students receive and perceive feedback and how teachers structure and provide it. After the introduction of a newly developed feedback intervention aimed at improving the learning experience and, consequently, performance outcomes, it is now time to determine the next steps. This requires insight into and understanding of the usefulness and effectiveness of the recently introduced educational intervention, and this insight should be based on empirical evidence. This paper reports on the first part of an empirical study organized as a two-part project aimed at determining to what extent the new feedback intervention has had a positive impact on the learning experience and outcomes. The study also aims to determine the effect sizes and their relationships, along with the impact of the feedback characteristics on the goals in relation to the complex task of creating robust and best practice-compliant CAD models.