Educação à Distância: Efeitos do feedback atrasado e imediato no desempenho de alunos em um Ambiente Virtual de Aprendizagem

Abstract

Distance Education has acquired special relevance in the current context of learning. Feedback, information about the learner's performance, is one of the necessary parts of the learning process. The effectiveness of different types of feedback is a widely studied topic, but research results are inconclusive about which type of feedback is the best. One of the issues in dispute is whether delayed feedback is more effective than immediate feedback, or vice versa. Research on the subject usually involves research with a short duration (maximum two weeks). Thus, this research sought to investigate the effects of immediate and delayed feedback, in a Virtual Learning Environment, during an academic semester, with Psychology undergraduate students. Using a repeated measures experimental design, this research sought to investigate the effects of delayed and immediate feedback, made available in online questionnaires on the Moodle platform, on the performance of students taking a mandatory discipline in an undergraduate Psychology course. The performance of students in online questionnaires, the number of attempts to solve the questionnaires and the performance in questionnaires applied in class were analyzed. The analysis of the performance in the online questionnaires and the number of resolution attempts did not indicate significative differences between the delayed and immediate feedback. The performance in the class questionnaires, however, pointed out a significant difference between the two feedback situations. The students' performance was superior when they had received immediate feedback. This result, however, must be evaluated with caution, since reservations about the number of participants, order effects, level of learning, previous knowledge of participants and history effects, need to be considered. Despite these results, future research should continue to investigate the effects of different times of feedback over longer periods, looking for strategies to repair the limitations of this research.