Making the Assessment Criteria Explicit through Writing Feedback: A Pedagogical Approach to Developing Academic writing

Abstract

Learning academic writing has traditionally been a stumbling block for Higher Degree Research (HDR) students. HDR supervision pedagogy is not always explicit. Many HDR supervisors maintain an ‘osmosis’ approach to learning about academic writing, and others, while acknowledging the importance of feedback on samples of HDR student writing, fail to provide feedback that enables a student to address the writing problems or to understand the nature of HDR assessment. There is a need to begin to map successful pedagogical practices in the HDR context and HDR supervisors can start this by researching their own practice.This study elaborates on the author’s development of an explicit assessment criteria (Productive Pedagogy) for a thesis while he was examining Practitioner Investigation reports for postgraduate students. He subsequently used this framework as a basis for providing feedback on writing samples from his HDR students. The paper encourages other HDR supervisors to explore their own constructs of ‘goodness’ in academic writing so that these constructs can inform explicit feedback to students about what makes up the notion of academic writing.