earticle

영어

The present article explores the potential of customized feedback and describes efforts made by an instructor and his students to track student progress in a fourth-year undergraduate course. As is mostly the case, unfortunately, students who have gone through the same program do not make similar improvements; some excel and others less so. In fact, many students are left confused after not having achieved the learning objectives of a course at the end of a semester. This article focuses its attention on those students. By diversifying communication channels and building a stronger rapport with students, the instructor was able to better identify what was troubling them. This article approaches this as going through thresholds: i) a threshold that an instructor must pass to better understand student's individual needs and ii) identify his/her respective “threshold concepts,” which is understood as "certain concepts, or certain learning experiences, (...) from which a new perspective opens up, allowing things formerly not perceived to come into view" (Land, 2018: ix). This study illustrates the efforts made to identify the strengths of individual students, point out area(s) of improvement, and suggest ways for improvement (study methods, tasks).