What Happens When Students Get Feedback on Their Writing?

When I talk about effective writing instruction, I often mention the importance of feedback. It’s a crucial component of what cognitive scientists call “deliberate practice.” That concept that can be applied to acquiring any complex skill, like playing the violin or playing tennis.

First, a teacher breaks the process into manageable chunks and has students practice the chunk they need to work on. Then comes the feedback, which should be prompt and targeted. When students have mastered one chunk, the teacher then guides students to practice another chunk.

Deliberate practice can make the basics of a process automatic, freeing up cognitive capacity for higher-order thinking. If, for example, you master the fingering of the violin to the point where you don’t have to think about it anymore, you can focus on things like intonation.

The application of deliberate practice to literacy is most straightforward with foundational skills like decoding words or spelling. If students practice those things to automaticity, they have more capacity for comprehension or expression.

The picture is somewhat different when it comes to higher-order writing skills. No amount of practice will make them entirely automatic. Even highly experienced writers need to devote conscious effort to choosing words, constructing sentences, and organizing paragraphs and essays. And it will always be harder to write about a topic you don’t know much about than one that’s familiar. Still, it certainly helps to have had deliberate practice with higher-order writing skills—including prompt, targeted feedback.

Feedback Often Doesn’t Help

But will students’ writing improve because of feedback alone? The evidence suggests that for many, the answer is no. Feedback works best when it’s part of a systematic method of instruction.

An organization called No More Marking, which uses an innovative approach called comparative judgment to evaluate student writing, has been thoughtfully experimenting with combining human and AI-generated feedback. (They’re sponsoring a webinar on the topic specifically for US teachers; for information and registration, click here.) They’ve also analyzed what happens after students get feedback.

At one school the organization partnered with, most students were able to use feedback to make improvements, but others struggled. In at least one case, a student tried to respond to feedback but ended up making his writing worse.

And a recent study of over 900 students in Germany paints an even more dispiriting picture. It found that