Project
About FONDECYT project N°1230206
Student reactions to feedback
Feedback during the learning process at any educational level is a ubiquitous practice. Offering oral or written feedback, individually or in groups, is a recurring activity in Higher Education and necessary to adjust performance to expected standards. Despite its frequency, university students are dissatisfied with the quality of feedback in their educational processes, as demonstrated by the results of the National Student Survey (NSS) of the United Kingdom and the National Student Engagement Assessment Survey (NSSE) (Zapata and Conejeros, 2020) applied in Chile.
Importance of writing in academic development
It seems necessary to pay attention to writing, since most of the evidence of learning that is requested and offered in universities is done through this performance.
In Chile, progress has been made towards the installation of devices to support students in their academic enculturation process, such as reading and writing support courses in their first years of training (Ávila Reyes et al, 2013; Navarro et al, 2020). However, it is necessary to continue implementing reading and writing practices in the classroom to promote the development of academic, disciplinary and professional skills. Written feedback, in our opinion, is a fundamental resource in the writing process, because it is through its development that subjects are learned and expected academic or professional performances are evidenced.
Feedback Studies
Several studies (Boud and Molloy, 2013; Winstone and Carles, 2021; Hattie and Clarke, 2020) reveal that attention needs to be paid to the way in which the professor offers feedback and how the student receives said resource. There are few studies in Spanish that provide empirical evidence on how written feedback is given in university contexts (Arancibia et al., 2019, Tapia-Ladino et al. 2016; Tapia-Ladino et al. 2017; Venegas et al. 2021; Ávila Reyes et al. 2021, among others). Such studies have focused on describing what the feedback offered by the professor is like, giving little evidence on what the students do. Therefore, it seems pertinent to know more about how university students experience their learning processes.
Objective of this project
To characterize the experience (feelings, actions and decisions) of students regarding the written feedback received by their teachers in different disciplines, in order to offer empirical evidence on the role of writing feedback in learning processes in higher education. We propose an exploratory-descriptive study with a qualitative design (Merriam, 2009) and an emic approach for data analysis, with the aim of putting the experiences and perspectives of the participants at the center (Lillis, 2008).
Project phases
We distinguish two phases of work, a general one in which we will find out, through the application of a broad survey (Smith, 2021 and 2022) to students from two universities and from different disciplinary areas, their experience with feedback from their teachers and what they have done with the comments received during the preparation of a piece of writing. In the second phase we will work with students who are developing their final degree project in two different disciplinary areas: STEM+ and Social Sciences and Humanities. The objective will be to collect information on the reception of comments on drafts offered by their tutor, as well as to analyze the feelings that the process provokes and to know their learning experience. To do this, we will generate three data collection conditions: one aimed at capturing the reactions provoked by a draft commented by a tutor, then the online application of a questionnaire of feelings that the feedback provokes and a final in-depth interview that addresses the learning process. The data will be transcribed and subjected to analysis through qualitative coding. For the analysis, we will use qualitative analysis software and apply inter-analyst reliability indices to achieve a high level of agreement (Glasser & Laudel, 2013; Saldana, 2009). All ethical procedures that safeguard the rights of research participants will be applied.