Tutors' written feedback on essays: The way students make use of it

Abstract

Feedback on essays is essential for students' learning and improvement of performance. In this paper a conceptual model is presented for the essay writing process with feedback, including aspects that influence students' use of this feedback. Though most of these aspects have received close attention from several authors, particularly how students use feedback appears still to be under-researched. This situation prompted the following research questions: how do students make use of tutor' s written feedback on their essays, and to what extent do the student variables, motivation, learning strategies, perceptions of feedback, and perceptions of writing assignments, explain their use of feedback?

Therefore, a questionnaire was designed to assess students' scores on these variables. Seventy master students in the faculty of Development Studies at Melbourne University filled out the questionnaires. Besides, feedback comments of four teachers were analysed and five students were interviewed. The results of the questionnaires show that, as hypothesised, all mentioned student internal factors had a positive influence on students' use of feedback and explained together78% of the variance of it. Both the findings of the interviews and of the revision of teachers' written feedback indicated a large difference among teachers in quality, quantity and timing of feedback on written assignments. Further recommendations are given on how to increase the use and impact of feedback on essays.