Correlates of College Students' Use of Instructors' Comments

Abstract

Introduction Most writing researchers agree that providing feedback to students is an effective way to improve writing from grade school to college. However, when reading instructors' comments on their stories, students are faced with interpreting what the notations mean and how they should use the suggestions to revise stories. Written comments also concern their teachers, who spend hours providing detailed feedback on both writing quality and content in hopes that students will improve their subsequent drafts. Many journalism students use their teachers' feedback to polish and refine second drafts of their articles. Some students ignore their teachers' feedback, while others simply refuse to use the comments during the revision process. Still more may be confused and not understand the feedback. Overeager students may misinterpret the comments and make new errors on second drafts. Instructors find that constructive criticism can increase some students' self-efficacy beliefs in their ability to write and motivate them to work harder and improve their writing. However, the same comments that were intended to be constructive can cause other students to dislike writing and to give up trying to improve subsequent drafts. Those students may even develop writing apprehension as a result of feedback. Writing apprehension seems to be more common in poor writers than in skilled writers, although it is possible that poor writing skills may lead to writing apprehension. Furthermore, writing apprehension can begin at a young age and become a lifelong problem. Journalism teachers who are aware of students suffering from writing apprehension or students with high self-efficacy beliefs in their ability to write may be able to provide more effective feedback. Because many journalism teachers provide extensive feedback on both the writing mechanics and content of their students' stories, it would benefit instructors to understand the relationships among writing apprehension, writing self-efficacy, and students' use of instructors' comments. Considering the close scrutiny that journalism instructors give to their students' stories, it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to the relationships among feedback and students' affective writing constructs. The driving force behind the current study stemmed from an interest in how to provide more effective, relevant feedback to students. This research investigated the claims of previous studies that students tend to use certain types of feedback and ignore others when revising rough drafts. However, this study considered feedback use in light of individuals' writing apprehension, self-efficacy beliefs, and writing outcomes expectations, defined as the value individuals place on writing to achieve goals. This study will examine student use of global and local feedback. Straub and Lunsford categorized global feedback as comment upon a written composition's content, such as the ideas, development and organization.1 Local feedback is a comment on mechanical writing issues. Straub's study of 147 freshman writing students indicated that students preferred comments on both local and global matters.2 Daly found that people with high levels of writing apprehension tend to be poor writers compared to people with moderate or low levels.3 Furthermore, according to Daly, poor writers often have a history of receiving negative feedback on their writings. Flower and Hayes noted that poor writers may concentrate more on spelling or other mechanical tasks than on the content of their compositions.4 In a case study of a high-apprehensive writer, Selfe also observed that she seemed more concerned with avoiding mechanical errors than with the thematic soundness of her composition.5 McCarthy, Meier, and Rinderer found a strong relationship between high self-efficacy beliefs in one's writing abilities and writing performance. …