Giving pupils feedback on their achievements is an integral part of a teacher’s work. Quality feedback is timely, accurate, targeted, and tailored to each individual pupil. Several foreign and Slovene studies identify the positive effects of feedback. This is deemed to improve learning achievement, increase motivation, and provide pupils with guidance on their future work. Feedback is highly valued also when it comes to non-fiction texts written by pupils. By marking errors, teachers provide feedback to pupils on their performance through assessment of their vocabulary, syntax, spelling, style, and metalinguistic skills. To make the feedback even more productive, teachers can add a short comment at the bottom of the text outlining in accessible terms the areas the pupil already masters and those needing further work, thus offering guidance for future learning.
In this master’s thesis, I analysed the feedback teachers give to pupils on their written non-fiction texts.
In the theoretical part, I defined communication, text, and the evaluation of non-fiction writing abilities. I presented the specific features of formative monitoring and feedback.
The empirical research was carried out in two parts. In the first part, I analysed 45 already corrected animal descriptions produced by 4th grade pupils. In the second part, I conducted an online survey among 76 primary school teachers to find out what kind of feedback they give to pupils about their non-fiction texts.
The analysis of the corrected animal descriptions revealed that teachers rarely add comments at the bottom of the texts. When correcting pupils’ mistakes, many are overlooked or wrongly corrected, most often grammar and spelling mistakes.
The results of the survey show that the majority of teachers provide pupils with feedback on their written non-fiction texts. They frequently correct non-fiction texts produced by pupils in class or as homework. They evaluate non-fiction writing according to predefined criteria that they determine together with the pupils. There are statistically significant differences among teachers in the frequency of evaluation of structural adequacy, depending on the class they teach. On average, teachers believe that they rarely make mistakes when evaluating non-fiction texts. The results show that more than half of the teachers believe that mistakes occur because they overfocus on a certain type of error when evaluating. Most of the teachers surveyed often supply non-fiction texts with comments. There are statistically significant differences among teachers, depending on the class they teach, in the frequency with which they describe their opinions and add stamps or other symbols when commenting on pupils’ non-fiction writing. There are also statistically significant differences among teachers of different seniority reflected in the frequency with which they include information about goal achievement and proverbs in their written comments to pupils’ non-fiction texts.
Based on research findings and theoretical background, I have developed guidelines for primary school teachers on giving quality feedback to pupils on their non-fiction writing.
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