Critical Analysis of Embedded and Summative Feedback from Online Doctoral Instructors on Benchmark Major Assessments

Kelley Walters, Patricia Henry

Abstract


Providing transparent written feedback to doctoral students is essential to the learning process and preparation for the capstone. Written feedback is even more critical in an online environment where face-to-face interaction is limited. Two major types of feedback that play a determining factor to student success are embedded and summative feedback. Hence, providing students with clear and consistent feedback on scholarly written course work enhances the writing abilities of doctoral candidates and prepares them to write their final capstone. The purpose of this study was to conduct an exploration of faculty feedback on benchmark written assignments in an online doctoral program. The researchers examined instructor feedback provided to online doctoral students on scholarly writing assignments throughout their doctoral program. The Corpus for this analysis included 236 doctoral level written assignments that included feedback from approximately 51 faculty members. Student papers were submitted between January and December 2011 and were retrieved from all content courses in the doctoral program. Researchers identified the types and frequencies of embedded and summative written feedback, while also developing an analysis of relationships that existed between page length and embedded feedback. This study sought to accomplish four goals: (1) Describe the types and frequency of embedded feedback. (2) Describe the frequency and patterns of faculty summative feedback on student papers. (3) Analyze if there is a relationship between embedded feedback and summative feedback. (4) Analyze if there is a relationship between length of paper and embedded feedback.


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