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Yes. You've got it. A grade or score assigned to
the paper. What do most students normally do
afterwards? Yes. You are right again. They stuff
the paper into their backpacks or folders. What do
you think students would do if the paper contains
comments? About the answer to this question,
let's see what Bart (2009) said,
with individualized feedback. Specifically, 66%
of 30 participants selected 5 (strongly preferred)
while 36% chose 4 (preferred) when answering the
survey question: “From your perspective, do you
support the online feedback provided by Dr. Chang
to your own submissions of assignments? Please
choose a numeral on the following scale with 1
indicating the least support and 5 the most sup-
port.” The following present a few justifications
for their feelings: “The comments are helpful for
learning the materials.” “They are helpful in cor-
recting and improving work, which also increases
the amount of learning acquired.” “All of the
feedback promotes further learning and thinking.
They help me have a better understanding of what
I did wrong and right, and how I can improve.”
“I like to know when I have a good idea and the
teacher notices it. Feedback also prompts me to
expand my observations, because sometimes I
don't include enough details.” “I appreciated
how timely the feedback was given because of it
being online.” Students also acknowledged that
the effective formative feedback enabled them
to become the owner of their own learning: “It
[feedback] all allowed me to be responsible for
my own learning.” “Dr. Chang's online feedback
was always prompt and encouraging to do better
as a student to further our education.”
With the understanding of the instructor's effort
in providing formative feedback to assist students
in constructing deep levels of knowledge, now
let's look at practical strategies that are derived
from my research, literature review, and experi-
ences and that may help those who are interested
in and responsible for developing, delivering, and
implementing formative assessment and feedback
with the inclusion of teacher immediacy behaviors
in a computer-mediated text-based communication
system. Please note that, for a better understand-
ing, each suggested strategy will then be given a
brief explanation.
You pore over students' writing assignments, add-
ing what you feel are insightful and encouraging
comments throughout each paper. Comments you
hope your students will take to heart and use to
improve their writing next time around. Then you
return the papers and the students quickly look at
the grade and stuff the paper into their backpacks..
perhaps mumbling something under their breath as
they do... This same scenario plays out with each
subsequent writing assignment, and each side gets
more frustrated. The instructor can't understand
why he sees the same types of mistakes over and
over again, and then students resign themselves
to the fact that “I'm just not a good writer.
Bart's (2009) narration seems to indicate that
students do not like feedback given by the instruc-
tor. However, it is not the case. Part of Gallien
and Oomen-Early's (2008) study focused on what
type of feedback was preferred by students. They
randomly divided 71 participants into two different
treatment groups with one receiving personalized
feedback and the other collective feedback. The
researchers surveyed the online students to solicit
their perceptions of course satisfaction and per-
ceived connectedness to the instructor with two
different types of methods of feedback offering:
the individualized and collective. It was found that
the students receiving individualized feedback
from their instructor not only performed better,
but also felt more satisfied with the course than
those given collective feedback. The finding of
this study is consistent with Chang's (2009c) study,
which reported that the students felt very satisfied
with the way that the instructor provided them
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