2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Feedback is one of the most essential elements of education, as it is formed directly as a response to and consequence of student performance. Feedback is the medium through which we communicate to learners their proficiency, and the channel through which courses can have long term impact through measures such as grades and GPA. Prior work suggests that feedback is a powerful factor in determining academic outcomes, but that the impact is mediated by factors related to the delivery and relevance of feedback. However, a point of friction when utilizing existing tools for feedback is the focus on the grade and content knowledge. The focus on providing feedback solely for content knowledge may fail to recognize the role of behavior in academic performance, when students either fail to submit assignments or submit them late.

By applying this form of feedback, we may provide more information to allow students to improve in the course, and keep track of their course related behavior. Additionally, as more systems are developed to evaluate students in alternative ways such as mastery, specification, or contract based grading, traditional tools and reporting methods may fall short due to their focus on grades as feedback. Many of these practices exist under the umbrella of equitable practices, which seek to remove disparities in outcomes for students. As such, when we build a tool that may also be utilized in the context of equitable practices and alternative grading, we believe it valuable to provide early suggestions as to whether or not this practice itself is also equitable.

In order to better understand aspects of behavior-based feedback, this work focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of a submission-based feedback system, designed to give students feedback on whether or not assignments have been submitted. Submission-based feedback is a specific manifestation of behavior-based feedback, which seeks to provide feedback to students on submission behavior. To do so, we utilize a structured approach to generating meaningful feedback for students, and a code-based tool to generate progress reports for students. We evaluate this implementation utilizing a mixed-methods approach, where we utilize qualitative data collection through Nominal Group Technique (NGT) to inform and expand the scope of data collected through quantitative methods. Our results suggest that students perceive submission progress reporting as helping in the dimensions identified in literature and by our focus groups, and that these benefits are not uniquely experienced across demographic groups analyzed.