USING FEEDBACK THROUGH BLOGS TO ENHANCE STUDENTS' SELF- REFLECTION AND LEARNING.
Authors: Ion Georgeta , Stingu Mihaela 
Published: February 2023

An essential part of the students learning process at university comes from engaging them with and reflecting on the feedback received on assessed work.
Students are interested in and value feedback and there is evidence in the literature that it can prompt reflection and deeper learning. There are authors considering that written reflection can be more powerful than oral discussion (Yinger& Clark, 1981) and provides a permanent record for later reference. During their timeat university, students receive different kinds of feedback on their submitted work from teachers and peers that most will rarely experience again. Good feedback practice 'facilitates the development of self-assessment (reflection) in learning' (Nicol& Macfarlane-Dick, 2006, p. 207) and indicates things to build on (Hyland, 2000). Feedback is the most powerful single factor that enhances achievement and increases the probability that learning will happen (Hattie & Jaeger, 1998), though in order to achieve this, good feedback practice is essential (Juwah et al., 2004). Hounsell, McCune, Hounsell, and Litjens (2008) propose a model that incorporates a guidance and feedback loop to promote learning from all types of assessment, with emphasis on feeding forward to the next piece of work as the final step; thoughevidence suggests only some students will use it in this way (Ding, 1998; Hyland, 2000).

Starting from these premises, our study aims to analyse blogs as learning spaces that facilitate the feedback process by proposing a means of using feedback on assessment as a vehicle for greater student reflection. The study was carried out during the second semester of the academic year 2012-2013 in a course entitled Pedagogy I and delivered to students engaged in initial teacher education in the field of Psychology in first grade at the University of Bucharest.

During classes teachers provided continous feedback on the students work both written through blogs and oral during the weekly meetings
At the end of the experience a survey with scaled questions was administrate and 63 students responded. In order to have a deeper understanding of what were the students'opinions regarding the using of feedback we asked some of the students to participate in a focus-group.

The results demonstrate that students are highly satisfied with the guidance received during the learning process (74,6%) and 76,19% considered they learned during the process. The participants agreed that the feedback provided by the teachers help them to develop their teamwork competency and make them more aware about the learning objectives and progress made (63,49%). Another important aspect is related to the peerfeedback The students considered that providing and receiving feedback to and from their peers help them to regulate their learning and improve their knowledge (77,77%).
We can conclude that through good feedback (fast, centred on the students progress, permanent and coming from different sources) students could improve the quality of their assignments and accordingly contribute to the students deeper learning and progress.