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Effective Feedback« Role of Genre | Practice and Response Home | What about Grammar? » The question you might ask next is what sort of feedback would be most useful. What feedback can you, as a biologist, provide? I know some of your colleagues feel you should mark every error on students’ papers, but research does not support this approach. (Straub) Minimal marking of obvious errors which interfere with your reading or which simply annoy you will encourage students to revise, and you can refer them to the University Writing Center if they need help with errors outside your area of expertise. Your feedback will be most constructive if you encourage students to engage with the issues relevant to writing in biology. Once again, you should not simply re-write or edit for them, except perhaps on occasion to model a technique or approach. Instead ask them to develop, expand, re-think, re-frame, and revise. Indicate the general problem or suggest a possible direction, but let the students do the thinking and the actual revision. We have evidence showing students agree that their work improves when they receive constructive feedback, that is, feedback that guides their improvement and encourages reflective consideration of rhetorical strategies. An unpublished survey of 300 students taking writing intensive classed, conducted by Deborah S. Bosley of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, with a response rate of 50%, showed: 50% of those students, when asked ‘What factors do you think were most critical in improving your writing? ’indicated that 1) having the opportunity to revise, and 2) getting feedback from the professor were most crucial to their own writing improvement.
Other evidence comes from Richard Light’s Making the Most of College. According to William Condon of Washington State University, Light’s book “emphasizes the role of writing in student engagement, and it reinforces the results from Light’s earlier assessment reports—that frequent opportunities to write and get feedback matter more than the standard big term paper, etc.” Jeff Jablonski recommends Kathleen Blake Yancey’s book Reflection in the Writing Classroom (Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 1998), in which she argues “that writers need to acquire the meta-rhetorical ability (or skill or knowledge) to strategically reflect on how new situations resemble old situations. And when they don’t, which is quite often given situational variability, writers need guidance from those more knowledgeable with the particular discourse conventions.” Christopher Thaiss of George Mason University recommends his Engaged Writers and Dynamic Disciplines: Research on the Academic Writing Life, co-authored with Terry Zawacki (Heinemannn, 2006 ) Their research shows further confirmed that students wiring in the disciplines are more engaged and better integrated into their disciplines. by Valerie Balester, July 2006 « Role of Genre | Practice and Response Home | What about Grammar? » |