Philosophies on feedback

Ferris, D. R. (2014). Responding to student writing: Teachers’ philosophies and practices.    

             Assessing Writing, 19, 6-23.

Ferris identifies that there is a lack of research involving teachers’ viewpoints on feedback. Most research focuses on how students react to corrective feedback. She conducts a multiphasic study through a survey of 129 instructors and 23 interviews within this group of instructors. Ferris asks about the instructors’ actual response practices, a description of their philosophies toward response, and for the 23 interviewees, examines whether their philosophies match their practices. Ferris finds that most instructors have had some training on feedback, which informs their own philosophies on the subject.

Ferris identifies four main philosophy types: the idealist, new instructors more concerned with the process; the pragmatist, just trying to get the job done; the outsider, shunning research and established methodologies; the dedicated veteran, interested in always improving their feedback strategies. Ferris finds discrepancies between some instructors’ philosophies and implementation of feedback, but not all. Instructors most value one-to-one conferences, and there are varied peer-review practices going on. Ferris suggests that more needs to happen after the peer reviews to hold students accountable.

Ferris’s overall recommendations are for instructors to focus more on what students do after receiving the feedback and more computer-based feedback. This article is from 2014 and most likely more and more teachers are starting to use electronic comments. Her argument for this, which I agree with, is that they are much more legible and often less cryptic. They can also be saved and then reproduced more easily.

This study is rather small, but yielded interesting results. Anyone who teaches and is curious about their own feedback practices could benefit from it. They could answer the questions from the online survey from their own point of view, and see how they compare to other instructors. The article also gives specific suggestions based on the current research for “best practices” as pertains to feedback. Overall, this article is a good introduction into the question of how to provide feedback to students and what steps to take after the initial feedback.