Title: Peer-to-peer dialogue about teachers’ written feedback enhances students’ understanding on how to improve writing skills.
Short description of study set-up: Sixty-three second-year university students participated in a pre-test-post-test design with mixed methods.
Instruments:
Questionnaires:
Students’ perceptions of the quality of both the written feedback in terms of Feed up, Feed back and Feed forward and the feedback dialogue were measured using an adjusted version of a validated questionnaire by De Kleijn et al. (2014). The questionnaire contained 16 items of which one item targeted the overall quality of teachers’ written feedback on a ten-point scale, ranging from 1 to 10. The remaining 15 items were distributed among three subscales, specifically ‘Feed up’ (four items), ‘Feed back’ (six items) and ‘Feed forward’ (five items), and rated on a five-point Likert-type scale, ranging from 1 (fully disagree) to 5 (fully agree). An example of a feed-up item is: ‘By means of the written feedback it is clear what the assessment criteria of a scientific report are’. An example of a feed-back item is: ‘The written feedback indicates what I do wrong’ and an example of a feed-forward item is: ‘The written feedback indicates how I can improve my report’. The questionnaire that was administered before and after the intervention comprised similar items. In the post-test questionnaire, a few items were added to measure how students perceived the quality of the feedback dialogue. A reliability analysis of the feed-up, feed-back and feed-forward subscales within pre- and post-test questionnaires yielded acceptable reliability coefficients ranging from 0.79 to 0.91 (Peterson 1994). Preliminary pilot-tests were conducted to determine item clarity and adjustments were made to unclear items. Additionally, the logistics of the intervention were tested during the pilot-test.
Focus groups:
To provide more in-depth data focus groups were conducted (Stalmeijer et al. 2014). At the end of the last feedback dialogue session of both tracks, each student was invited for a focus group session. Eventually, two focus groups comprised six students and lasted approximately one hour. The third focus group contained 12 students; it was a combined group of two times six students, because we unfortunately scheduled the meetings at the same time. To ensure each student’s voice to be heard, this focus group continued for one and a half hour. Each focus group was guided by a moderator (fourth author) and was observed by one member of the research team. In semi-structured interviews, the actual topics discussed in the focus groups covered student experiences regarding the content of the written teacher feedback as well as the added value of the peer-to-peer dialogue about this written feedback. The interviews were audiotaped.
Explanation of data files:
The data files contain 114 anonymized pdf’s of the original questionnaires filled in by the participants; Focus group interviews; audio files of focus groups; transcripts of focus groups; SPSS Data file Schillings-complete DA.sav.
Quantitative data files:
114 Original questionnaires (pdf’s), archived as questionnaires in pdf.7zip
1 Data file Schillings-complete DA.sav (SPSS file)
Total SPSS tabellen (Word document): meaning and ranges or codings of all columns
Study 2 variabelen kwantitatieve vragenlijst (pdf)
Quantitative data files:
Focus groep interview-gids (Word document)
8 audio files of 3 focus groups (6 m4a files; 2 wav files), as audio focusgroepen a.7zip;
Transcripts of 3 focus group (Word documents)
