Title: A review of educational dialogue strategies to improve academic writing skills.
Methods
Search strategy: In April 2017, we searched the following online databases: Web of Science, EMBASE, ERIC, CINAHL, PsycINFO and Google Scholar. At first, we searched on ‘feed up’, ‘feed back’ and ‘feed forward’ but this strategy did not produce enough suitable articles so we added the term ‘feedback’. To minimize the chance of missing relevant articles, the scope was broad and included the following string of keywords and Boolean operators: ‘dialogue OR discussion OR conversation’ AND ‘feedback’ AND ‘writing’.
Inclusion and exclusion criteria: The electronic literature search was limited to English full-text studies published since 1990. Only articles that met the following inclusion criteria were selected: peer-reviewed, empirical studies with a particular focus on academic writing, published in the field of academic education, including all disciplines that discussed interventions employing face-to-face feedback dialogue. We excluded literature reviews and case studies, studies that did not focus on academic writing or studies that only addressed the online, digital or ICT aspects of the main topics.
Data extraction: The first author performed the search, yielding 1508 records. After removal of duplicates, the titles and abstracts of the remaining records (N=1182) were screened on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The resulting records (N=304) contained the topics ‘dialogue’, ‘feedback’ and ‘writing’. Further eligibility was subsequently assessed by reading the full articles on this list. After this phase, 102 articles remained for consideration. Of those, only articles that discussed a feedback intervention involving ‘face-to-face dialogue’ before submission of an academic writing assignment were included. As a result, the final review was based on 19 studies (Figure 1).
Data analysis: We scrutinized each intervention for the presence of feed-up, feed-back and feed-forward information (Black and Wiliam, 2009; Hattie and Timperley, 2007; Jonsson, 2012; Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick, 2006; Price et al., 2010; Rae and Cochrane, 2008). For the purpose of this review, we considered educational strategies such as assessment criteria, exemplars, worked examples and training (e.g. instructions or workshops) as expressions of feed-up information; written lecturer feedback and written peer review/assessments as feed-back information; and instructions to revise draft products as feed-forward information. In the next step, we checked which and how many participants were involved in the dialogue (student-student, lecturer-student or a combination of both). Since the studies did not describe the content of the face-to-face dialogues, we did not categorize them in terms of feed up, feed back and/or feed forward. Third, we operationalized intervention outcomes in terms of students’ perceptions of the intervention, their marks and by text/dialogue analysis. Finally, in assessing the effectiveness of each intervention, we took into account the methodological characteristics of each study, including their study design, data sources and data collection methods (Creswell, 2014).
