“Students’ Perceptions of Written Instructor Feedback on Student Writing”
Download PDF About the AuthorEric Wisz is currently a graduate student in the University of Central Florida’s Rhetoric and Composition M.A. program. His research interests include writing center studies and instructor feedback on student writing. Contents |
ConclusionThe results on which I chose to focus in this article are representative of trends that I saw in the data. There were many instances in which participants expressed different and even contradictory perceptions, interpretations, and potential uses of written instructor feedback on student writing. I believe that these differences are products of a variety of factors, such as the participants’ years in school, areas of study, and personal preferences. In the future, it would be advantageous for studies inquiring on students’ perceptions, interpretations, and/or uses of written instructor feedback on student writing to focus on narrower populations of students (e.g., students in first-year writing classes, students studying technical communication, or students studying physical sciences). By studying a narrow population, we might be able to uncover more specific trends than what are presented in this study in terms of what these students find useful in instructor feedback and how they use feedback to improve as writers. More specific trends about students’ relationships with instructor feedback will provide us with more concrete and pragmatic advice in terms of the practices instructors use to give feedback on student writing. While studies of narrow populations may lead to more specific results, there were some distinct patterns from the data in this study that are important to consider. First, participants preferred feedback when it was given from a reader’s perspective. Just as Brannon and Knoblauch (1982) and Shaughnessy (1977) posited, seeing a reader’s perspective helps student writers to notice where the ideas of the page were not yet fully developed in terms of the writer’s intended meaning. As Straub (1997) suggested, open-ended questions in feedback prompted participants to consider the relationship between ideas and the further development of these ideas. The findings of this study support Straub’s (2000) research in that I found that participants liked receiving suggestions/examples as a way to imagine what potential revisions could look like. They spoke about how they would use these suggestions/examples as a model to guide their revisions. The fact the participants prefer suggestions/examples supports the findings of Bone (2006), Duers and Brown (2009), Duncan (2007), Ferris (1997), Goldstein (2004), Higgins et al. (2002), Lynch and Klemans (1978), Poulos and Mahony (2008), Straub (1997), and Weaver (2006), all of which indicate that students prefer specific feedback. Finally, in accordance with Shaughnessy (1977), participants found explanation valuable in learning grammar rules and the language norms of discourse communities. As Hyland (2003) and McMartin-Miller (2014) found with multilingual students, participants in this study tended to value feedback on grammar. Before discussing important takeaways of this study, I would like to highlight another limitation in addition to the nonrepresentational and limited participant sample. Only two examples of instructor feedback were used, so not all kinds of feedback styles/approaches were captured in this study. The results suggest that participants recognized that other feedback approaches exist, as participants did not necessarily favor one feedback example over the other. It is important to note that participants in this study saw value in various modes of feedback—reflective comments, questions, suggestions/examples, explanation, and corrections. Although many participants, when asked to generalize about their preferred feedback mode, discussed open-ended questions, they identified how different modes of commenting are advantageous in different situations. Participants saw the value in and said that, ideally, they would like explicit suggestions/examples alongside questions, but they preferred these to be framed as possible models, not strict guides to which they were expected to adhere. For me, these results affirm the notion that we have a myriad of pedagogical tools when responding to student writing, and to not utilize all of them at the times when they are called for is doing our students a disservice. Another common theme from the data across the participants is that the framing of feedback affects how participants construct their hypothetical revision processes. As Straub (2000) found, students tend to see writing through a “form” and “content” binary. The type of feedback that students receive affects through which lens of this binary they view the particular revisions that they enact. On the one hand, as Shaughnessy (1977) discussed, feedback that discusses word choice and grammatical structures prompts students to focus on the discursive representation of their ideas. On the other hand, as Straub (1997) noted, asking open-ended questions prompts students to consider the paper holistically and see the relationship between the main ideas that they discuss throughout their paper. Similar to Abdollahifam’s (2014) and Hedgcock and Lefkowitz’s (1994) findings with multilingual students, this study finds that students appreciate feedback that directs their thinking towards the “content” side of the binary. Unlike Straub’s (2000) study, participants in this study appreciated feedback that challenged the ideas on the page. However, there might be ways to undermine the student perception of a form-content binary. Asking open-ended questions and then pointing out how students’ word choices and/or grammatical structures do or do not provide clear answers to these questions might be a way to demonstrate to students that language is the construction of ideas more so than the mere transmission of them. The results here suggest that more research needs to be done to better understand how feedback impacts students’ revision processes. Perhaps the most important takeaway from this study is the fact that participant responses suggest that different forms of feedback are effective for different students in different contexts. Feedback, like writing, is a contextual, or rhetorical activity. Participants noted that how they perceived the feedback in this study would depend on many contextual factors, including their relationship with their instructor and their background knowledge on the subject matter. Further, this study only focused on formative feedback—what students see as effective summative feedback could be quite different than what they value in formative feedback. Although feedback is a complex rhetorical activity, it is my hope that this research has given us an opportunity to listen to how a handful of students perceive, react to, and use instructor feedback on student writing. |