“Students’ Perceptions of Written Instructor Feedback on Student Writing”
by Eric Wisz | Xchanges 13.2, Fall 2018
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. Participants were recruited from four writing studies classes during the Fall 2017 semester. Interviews were recorded with student permission for later transcription and analysis.
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. In Example 1, feedback provides students with potential rewordings of phrases and sentences. 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, written in an impersonal tone (e.g., “Omit” and “Insert comma”), and explicit with 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. 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 and 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.
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, and asked them to pretend as if they had received this feedback on their own rough draft and would be revising and submitting 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.