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

by Eric Wisz | Xchanges 13.2, Fall 2018

Instructor Feedback in Literature

Instructor as a Reader and Audience Awareness

A common goal of instructor feedback is to give student writers the perspective of a reader on their writing. As Elbow (1973) eloquently put it, he tries “to transmit my experience of [their] words” (p. 121). The hope is that in doing so student writers will understand their readers’ points of view and develop a sense of audience awareness, an important rhetorical skill one needs to produce effective writing.

Brannon and Knoblauch (1982) argued that the urge to revise comes from the sense of not having fully communicated an intended meaning (p. 163). They suggested that by pointing out the perceived meaning, instructors can highlight where the perceived meaning falls short of the intended meaning. For Brannon and Knoblauch, the purpose of instructor feedback is to “make the writer think about what has been said, not to tell the writer what to do” (p. 163). They believed firmly in a nondirective approach that “return[s] control of choice-making as soon as possible to the writer, while also creating a motive for making changes” (p. 163).

Feedback Familiarizing Students with Discourse Communities

Academic disciplines are groups of people with the same goals, and the values that underlie these goals form discourse communities of and within academic disciplines (Journet, 1999). Feedback on student writing can be used to communicate values and norms of these discourse communities to students. In his discussion of paralogic hermeneutic theories, Dobrin (1999) suggested that discourse community expectations should be clear to students so that they are empowered to be effective communicators in these discourse communities. Feedback is a tool that instructors use, wittingly or not, to communicate the values of these systems and communities to students.

Student Perspectives

Previous studies on students’ perspectives on instructor feedback on student writing have found a diverse array of student opinions on and preferences for feedback. In their study of students’ perspectives of feedback, Poulos and Mahony (2008) found that “students do not hold a homogenous view of what effective feedback is and how it could be used” (p. 145). Straub (1997) found that students prefer a variety of forms of written feedback, including advice, open-ended questions, and explanation.

Despite the diversity of student preferences, general trends emerge. Previous work indicated that students prefer feedback that is clear (Bevan et al., 2008; Lizzio & Wilson, 2008) and specific. Straub (2000) found that students respond well to positive comments, preferring comments that acknowledge and develop the ideas on the page. However, students in this study believed there to be a strong distinction between form and content and did not necessarily feel that the main purpose of instructor feedback is to focus on the ideas (content) but the writing itself (form).

Studies on Multilingual Writers’ Perceptions and Uses of Feedback

Much of the scholarship on students’ perceptions and uses of instructor feedback on student writing has focused on multilingual students. Conrad and Goldstein (1999) and Hyland (1998, 2003) noted that multilingual students’ use of instructor feedback varies greatly from student to student. Ferris (1997) found that specific comments tended to prompt more positive revision among multilingual students than did general comments. Hyland (2003) and McMartin-Miller (2014) found that multilingual writers see the value in feedback related to errors. Students in Hyland’s study believed that repeated feedback on errors would lead to long-term improvement in error recognition and correction (p. 228).

The aim of this study is to contribute to the research on students’ perceptions of feedback a handful of in-depth student perspectives on instructor feedback on student writing. In order to gather in-depth responses, participants were asked to read and engage with mock student writing and instructor feedback in one-on-one interviews.