Feedback, engagement, and integrative learning: a trace-based case study in a synchronous course
Abstract
This case study examines how formative assessment performance, student engagement traces, and instructor feedback language co-vary with performance on a final integrative assessment. The study was conducted in a 12-week, second-year Framework for Higher Education Qualifications (FHEQ) Level 6) undergraduate course on empirical analysis and the scientific method (N = 49). We triangulate low-stakes assessments, platform-generated engagement indicators (talktime, hand raises, votes, reactions, and chat messages), and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2022 (LIWC-22) features of instructor feedback. Psychological safety serves as a theoretical lens for interpreting students’ contributions, responses to feedback, and continued engagement after lower early formative scores; the empirical analysis rests entirely on observable assessment, participation, and feedback data. Classroom interaction data make some aspects of participation visible, but cannot, by themselves, reveal the learning conditions students experienced. We therefore treat behavioural and linguistic traces as descriptive features of instructional interaction. In-class verbal assessments were more strongly associated with integrative performance than group-based tasks, and students who maintained or increased participation following lower early scores showed upward formative trajectories. Instructor feedback was consistently characterised by high clout, positive tone, and analytic clarity, which we interpret as text-level features of the feedback environment. Grounded in educational psychology and learning analytics, the study offers a practical way to examine how assessment, participation, and feedback align with active learning instruction, using descriptive correlations, bootstrap confidence intervals, within-family false discovery rate adjustments, and an exploratory Classification and Regression Tree (CART) visualisation. The findings are specific to a single-course, small-cohort case based on one instructor’s assessments and synchronous records.