Student and Instructor Responses to E-Feedback

This empirical study provides further insight into how instructors decide on the methods used to respond to student writing and whether these criteria match what students want from this feedback. What are instructors\u27 considerations when they adopt e-feedback practices? Do these considerations align or conflict with student preferences for how they receive feedback? How does the rhetorical content of these technologies (visual presentation and choices offered to users) affect the ways both teachers and students use them? To address a research gap, this study focuses on e-feedback, which is in-document feedback from instructors distributed via the Web to students (also called digital feedback or electronic feedback) in two of the formats most widely used by college composition instructors: comments added to Microsoft Word files and comments left in GradeMark, the essay annotation and grading platform embedded within Turnitin.com. By comparing through surveys student impressions of e-feedback with the criteria instructors use to make decisions about what technologies to use when commenting, my goal is to give teachers a tool to make better-informed choices