RUME 27
2025
Alexandria, Virginia
An Analysis of Instructor Feedback on Student Work
Page: 1354
Feedback—the process of leaving remarks, questions, or markings on student work with the aim of enhancing student learning—is one of the more instructionally powerful but least understood features in instructional design (Cohen, 1985). Past studies offer inconsistent results on the features of feedback and little is known about how some of these factors benefit students’ interactions with feedback and how deep a student engages in the revision process. This study aimed to learn more about both classroom perspectives of feedback between the instructor and the student. The main population included entry-level college mathematics instructors and students; we examined their feedback practices to gain a better understanding of what elements of feedback are being used and if they match the type of feedback that students report is most valuable. In this paper, we will only focus on the instructor study as that was the primary research question. Instructors graded and left feedback on a collection of student work samples while students completed a questionnaire that asked how they use feedback, how highly they value it, and which feedback type they find most useful. A thematic analysis was conducted on each comment and were classified into specific groupings. Results indicate that the instructor feedback was overall non-actionable but by a small margin. Students preferred actionable feedback, signifying a disconnect between the two populations.