What do Students do with the Feedback They Receive?

Abstract

BRIEF SESSION DESCRIPTION:

What do students do with the written feedback they receive on their drafts? In the Writing Center, we have set out to answer this question in our own context, asking about the kinds of written feedback tutors provide to students who use our asynchronous online service, and how students take that feedback up as they revise. While our panel focuses specifically on peer writing tutor feedback, we hope to open up a larger conversation about writersââ¬â¢ revisions in response to classroom peer review or even instructor feedback, and how to shape feedback to prompt better revision. àParticipants will be able to describe several ideas for shaping feedback to prompt better revision and gain a greater understanding of student revision in response to peer feedback.

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FULL ABSTRACT:

What do students do with the written feedback they receive on their drafts? In the Writing Center, we have set out to answer this question in our own context, asking about the kinds of written feedback tutors provide to students who use our asynchronous online service, and how students take that feedback up as they revise. Researchers who have examined student revision in response to (third-party) feedback have found, for example, that student writers take up comments selectively, tending to avoid global revision (Beason 1993). When it does occur, however, fuller, high-quality revision is associated with non-directive written feedback rather than with directive feedback (Cho and McCarthy, 2016). Another element affecting student revision is the studentââ¬â¢s engagement with the feedback they receive (Zhang and Hyland, in press), raising the question of how a tutorââ¬â¢s feedback can better engage (or fail to engage) the writer.

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In our panel, we will share what weââ¬â¢ve learned about the kinds of written feedback tutors provide, the kinds of feedback that students choose to take up (and why), and how they do take it up in their revising. While our study focuses specifically on peer writing tutor feedback, we hope to open up a larger conversation about writersââ¬â¢ revisions in response to classroom peer review or even instructor feedback. We also invite conversation about this projectââ¬â¢s triple function as research, program evaluation, and tutor professional development.

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