Incorporating feedback in online cognitive diagnostic assessment for enhancing grade five students’ achievement in ‘time’

Time is a difficult topic for many elementary students. We evaluated the effect of the feedback incorporated in online Cognitive Diagnostic Assessment (CDA) on students’ achievement in this topic by conducting a sequential explanatory mixed method case study which involved 125 Grade Five students from the six classrooms in six Malaysian elementary schools. Simple feedback and detailed feedback were delivered to the participants in the control and experimental groups, respectively as intervention through the online CDA. The findings indicated that the detailed feedback was more effective than the simple feedback in enhancing the participants’ achievement in the topic of time. The findings of the follow-up interviews suggested that the comprehensiveness of the feedback, the usefulness of the feedback and the ability of feedback to engage students were the main factors which explained the effectiveness of the detailed feedback. This study sheds light on the advantages of incorporating detailed feedback in the online CDA. Thus, teachers may be encouraged to use it as a classroom assessment tool for providing instant detailed feedback in supporting students’ learning of the topic of Time.