zvutsrpon zyxwvu yw ISBN:978-84-613-2955-7 1 INSTRUCTIONAL FEEDBACK BASED CONTINUOUS EVALUATION. AN ANALYSIS FROM THE CONTROL THEORY POINT OF VIEW Ramon Vilanova (1), Pere Ponsa(2), Beatriz Amante (3) (1) Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona ETSE, 08193, Bellaterra ramon.vilanova@uab.cat (2) Technical University of Catalonia EPSEVG Av. Víctor Balaguer, s/n, 08800 Vilanova i la Geltrú, pedro.ponsa@upc.edu (3) Technical University of Catalonia Dept. Proyectos e Ingeniería, Colom 11, Terrassa, Spain beatriz.amante@upc.edu Abstract The instructional feedback model establishes a parallelism among a feedback control automated system and the relationships between the teacher/instructor and the student/learner. In such a model the teacher/instructor is assumed to be the controller or provider of energy to the system to be controlled (the student’s/learner skills and competences on a specific subject). The instructional feedback is a closed loop model that relies on receiving feedback from the students/learners and to generate different actions to modify its learning performance. In this communication the idea of instructional feedback is reviewed and slightly reformulated highlighting the necessity and importance of another feedback loop that has to be closed on the student/learner side as well as providing the means for this. On the conventional instructional feedback model the feedback is received at the teacher/instructor side, whereas it is, on the author’s opinion, at the student side that has to be closed in order to be effective. Keywords - Instructional feedback, Continuous Evaluation, Feedback based mechanisms INTRODUCTION Feedback is a by now a well established mechanism in engineering applied to develop automatic control systems [1, 2]. The main benefits of feedback come from the generation of an error signal among the desired target and the observed output. The main actors of a feedback control system are the process or system to be controlled and the controller. The controller acts on the system by generating appropriate control actions on the basis of the observed feedback error (target – observed system’s output). As a familiar example, we can consider a room temperature control where on the thermostat we set the desired temperature for the room (this is the target temperature). The temperature is sensed (observed system’s output) by and transferred to the thermostat that accordingly adjusts the heating/ventilating system in order to achieve the desired target temperature. The instructional feedback model [3] establishes a parallelism among the previously described situation and the relationships between the teacher/instructor and the student/learner. In such a model the teacher/instructor is assumed to be the controller or provider of energy to the system to be controlled (the student’s/learner skills and competences on a specific subject). The instructional Proceedings of ICERI2009 Conference. 16th-18th Nov 2009, Madrid, Spain. 002868