The study of teachers' written feedback to students' writing: changes in theoretical considerations and the expansion of research contexts

Abstract

This paper identifies four successive phases in the study of written feedback to students' compositions. The studies included in these phases are distinguished by views of writing instruction reflected in their theoretical frameworks: the view of writing instruction as a series of teacher provided stimuli and students' responses to these stimuli; the view that the writing class is a rhetorical community, where teacher and students interact as readers and writers over texts; the view of learning to write as a phenomenon both natural and problematic, where school may interfere with students' natural development; the view that learning to write, like all other learning, depends on successful studentteacher interactions within student's zone of proximal development. While reviewing recent studies of written feedback, the paper shows how these changing views of writing instruction are accompanied by changing theoretical perspectives for the study of the provision and processing of written feedback as well as by a gradual expansion of research contexts for looking at this problem. Finally, in view of such a line of development, it suggests an agenda for future research. The study of teachers' written feedback to students' writing and the theory of writing instructionIn theories of development and learning (Vygotsky, 1978;Brophy, 1981 andAnderson, 1982) response plays a central role. Hence, learning writers, like learners of other skills, need to know when they are performing well and when they are not. However, for learning writers the issue of feedback is especially significant. These writers need response not only for monitoring their own progress, but so that they learn to take another's perspective and adapt a message to it (Flower, 1979). Theoretically, constructive feedback offers such writers a means of discovering their readers' needs. This review will show that in effect, most learners do not receive such feedback.Writing theorists view the issue of feedback as problematic, because "...feedback to complex processes is usually inadequate and the level of mastery that the social environment supports is quite short of what that culture actually seems to need" (Bereiter and Scardamalia, 1982, p. 59). Along these lines, it has been pointed out by a number of writing instruction theorists (e.g. Sommers, 1982) that in learning to write, feedback, provided and processed ineffectively, may inhibit the writer's motivation for writing. According to them, ineffective feedback may divert the writer's attention from his or her own purposes and focus that attention on the teacher's intentions. 146A considerable number of recent studies have dealt with the questions of the provision and processing of written feedback to learning writers. On the whole, the current view is that written feedback is probably the least useful type of response students get to their writing (Freedman, 1987). Yet, because written feedback is the most common form of writing instruction, theorists are still searching for a way to describe the parameter...

Assessment for learning: a case study using feedback effectively in an essay‐style test

“…Furthermore, some studies have shown written feedback to be one of the least useful strategies for improving student writing (Freedman 1987;Zellermayer 1989). However, the written feedback in this study was appreciated by students for its persistence value as well as for the teaching of essay-writing skills and factual content.…”

Peer reviewers learn from giving comments

“…Past studies have consistently focused on the impact of feedback on the learning and performance of the writers who receive that feedback (e.g. Kulik and Kulik 1988) and on the reactions of those writers to that feedback (Coleman et al 1991;Zellermayer 1989). Recent comprehensive reviews have examined feedback in general (Kluger and DeNisi 1996), in education (Hattie and Timperley 2007) and in writing research (Beach and Friedrich 2006;Graham and Perin 2007).…”

Conceptualizing pre‐emptive formative assessment

“…This means that verbal feedback can be provided more readily and there is evidence (e.g., Boulet et al, 1990) that oral feedback may be more effective than written comments. Written feedback on homework or tests seems, however, often to be brief and ineffective; school students have been found to pay little attention to teachers' written comments (Zellermayer, 1989), or find them difficult to interpret and act upon (Clarke, 2000).…”