Understanding students’ perceptions of an automated feedback system: An empirical study based on UTAUT

Formative feedback has long been recognized as a crucial scaffold for student learning. There is an increasing interest in developing better strategies to provide students with automated feedback to scaffold their learning. In this research, an automated feedback system was developed to support student learning of conceptual knowledge in the course of writing assignments. In the proposed system, formative feedback is generated automatically with the help of concept maps constructed from instructors’ lecture slides and students’ writing assignments. The primary goal of this empirical study was to understand students’ perceptions of the proposed automated feedback system employing the model of Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). The preliminary results of the study show that the majority of the students (about 80%) perceived that the system is helpful for improving their coursework and would recommend doing the assignment with the proposed system for future classes.