“Students’ Perceptions of Written Instructor Feedback on Student Writing”

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About the Author

Eric 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

Introduction

Instructor Feedback in Literature

Student Interviews

Participant Demographics

Discussion

Conclusion

References

Appendices

Student Interviews

Qualitative data on students’ perceptions, interpretations, and uses of written instructor feedback on student writing were gathered through one-on-one interviews with undergraduate students at a large Midwestern university. All interviews were conducted by me. Participants were recruited from four writing studies classes during the Fall 2017 semester with the permission of the instructors of these courses. One participant was in none of these classes—she was a friend of another participant and volunteered to participate although I did not directly recruit her. Interviews were recorded with student permission for later transcription and analyzed. I submitted an IRB application for this study but was notified by IRB that this study did not need to go through the IRB process.

During the interviews, participants discussed two different examples of mock instructor feedback (Appendix A and Appendix B). I created these mock feedback examples using one page from a paper I wrote four years ago about the American Dream and landownership in the early American colonies. I then gave feedback on this page as an instructor using a modeling approach (Example 1, see Appendix A) and a dialogic approach (Example 2, see Appendix B). Some aspects of my original writing of the paper were modified so that I could craft comments on certain aspects of writing (e.g., topic sentences, comma errors, and citation errors). In Example 1, feedback provides students with potential rewordings of phrases and sentences. For example, one comment in Example 1 reads, “This is confusing. Reword: ‘J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur was a French-American who wrote about life in America during the time of the American Revolution. He wrote about…’” The comments in Example 1 are written in the imperative, and feedback is given on grammar, citation style, and word choice. The comments are short and written in an impersonal tone (e.g., “Omit” and “Insert comma”). They are explicit and provide little rationale. Example 1 contains a large amount of scaffolding. The feedback in Example 2 is written in a much more conversational tone with the goal of using the comments as a way to open up a dialogue between the instructor and student. For example, one comment on Example 2 reads, “As a reader, I want some context for this quote. Who’s saying it?” Comments in Example 2 take the perspective of a reader, offering reflective comments and asking open-ended questions. These comments are not as explicit and provide more rationale than the comments in Example 1. Example 2 contains a low amount of scaffolding. Example 2 does not address much of the grammar, word choice, and citation style issues that Example 1 addresses. Otherwise, the feedback comments in Examples 1 and 2 focus on the same areas of the text and express similar broad ideas to the student writer. The main differences of the two examples are the mode and tone in which the feedback is given—in other words, the difference is in how the feedback is framed.

While creating these feedback examples, I did not want to simply create a “directive” example and a “facilitative” example. Although these examples could be mapped onto a directive-facilitative spectrum, my intention in creating these models (and, as will be evident in future sections, discussing the data that resulted from the interviews) was to recognize complexities and nuances of feedback not captured by a reductive directive-facilitative paradigm.

Although the two feedback examples are not inherently antagonistic or incompatible with each other, they are fairly extreme in their approaches. By this I mean that Example 1 uses modeling to an extreme that would likely never be called for or practical in actual situations of feedback. Similarly, Example 2 uses questions to an impractical extreme. According to Straub (1996): 

At one extreme, some comments are overly harsh or disrespectful, and usurp control over student writing, making sweeping editorial changes and dictating what should be said or how it should be presented from top to bottom. At the other extreme, some teacher comments are so minimal and generic that they become detached and offer no help, no real response. Both extremes ought to be avoided. (p. 247)

Although Straub specifically discussed feedback that falls on the extremes of a directive-facilitative binary, his sentiment towards the impracticality of extreme forms of feedback is noteworthy.

During the interviews, participants read the sample student writing and the two examples of instructor feedback (see Appendix A and Appendix B). I told the participants that the student writing in these examples was one page of a larger paper turned into an instructor as a rough draft. I asked the participants to pretend as if they had received this feedback on a rough draft that they had turned in and that they were going to revise the paper and submit a final draft. I then asked them the interview questions (see Appendix C) on their perceptions, interpretations, and potential uses of the feedback from the two examples. As participants responded to the interview questions, I encouraged them to elaborate on their thoughts and asked follow-up questions that prompted participants to clarify their ideas and provide more detail and specificity to their responses.