What do STEM+ Students from Two Chilean Universities do with their Teachers’ Written Feedback Comments Recorded in their Drafts and how is this Related to their Final Grades?

Abstract

Feedback is crucial for assessing and learning; thus, teachers usually provide written feedback comments (WCF) to students. The purpose of this study is to identify what students do with the written feedback in tasks from the STEM+ discipline area and how it is related to the result of their grades, identifying the type of genre in each discipline. Participants were 5 university teachers and 57 students studying marine biology, phono audiology, and nutrition who performed 671 actions in authentic materials previously given by teachers from an intact class categorized in a corpus analysis. For this reason, this research follows a correlational longitudinal non-experimental approach. To achieve the objectives, the study uses Gardner and Nesi’s genre theory (2012) for text classification and a modified version of Faigley and Witte’s taxonomy (1981) to compare the decisions made by students concerning feedback comments made by teachers. Thus, the study compares the initial and final versions of each text based on teacher comments and correlates these findings with students’ grades. Results of this study indicate a significant correlation between students’ adoption of feedback and their grades. Furthermore, the two main life sciences genres from Gardner and Nesi’s study (2012) were found in the corpus.