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Leedham, Maria; Shrestha, Prithvi; Therova, Dana; Tuck, Jackie and Ullmann, Thomas
(2024).
Abstract
Distance learning in Higher Education has become increasingly prevalent, particularly post-Covid 19 (Dos Santos, 2022), yet little is known about the linguistic features of distance students’ assessed writing or about lecturer feedback on their texts. Much recent work is based solely on students’ writing and does not consider feedback comments (e.g. Nesi and Gardner, 2012). The current project explores both student writing and lecturer feedback in a distance learning setting across four disciplines (Business, Engineering, History and Childhood Studies) with a focus on how linguistic features vary across disciplines, demographic student profiles and levels of attainment. Also explored is how lecturers respond to student writing, with the aim of pointing to ways of reducing student attainment gaps.
The Student Writing and Tutor Assessment Practices (SWaTAP) team have compiled an innovative 8-million-word corpus of over 2,500 undergraduate assignments written in a distance learning context over a five-year period (2017-2022) from a total of 192 students across four disciplines. Student demographic data such as disability, carer status and socio-economic status has also been collected in order to compare texts across categories. In addition, a 0.7-million-word corpus of lecturer feedback from on-script comments has been compiled. In the ongoing phase of the project corpus analysis of both student texts corpus and feedback corpora is complemented by ‘talk-around-text’ interviews (Lillis, 2009) exploring lecturers’ practices and perspectives.
We intend to explore a wide range of linguistic features across a variety of subcorpora, and potentially also to track the potential impact of extensive/less extensive feedback comments. Through the tutor interviews, we will gain insights into how assessed writing is read and evaluated, potentially identifying links between particular textual features and positive or negative evaluations.
References
Dos Santos L. M. (2022). Online learning after the COVID-19 pandemic: Learners’ motivations. Frontiers Education. 1-13.
Lillis, T. (2009). Bringing writers’ voices to writing research: Talk around texts. In: A. Carter, L. Theresa & S. Parkin, Sue (Eds). Why Writing Matters: Issues of Access and Identity in Writing Research and Pedagogy. Studies in Written Language and Literacy (12). Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 169–187.
Nesi, H., and S. Gardner. (2012). Genres across the Disciplines: Student Writing in Higher Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plain Language Summary
This poster is a work-in-progress project on student writing and tutor assessment practices from the SWaTAP team. We collected student assignments from four qualifications at The Open University and also collected tutor feedback on these assignments. As well as the student writing, we have information on student disability, carer status, prior qualifications and so on. We are currently (Summer 2024) interviewing tutors across the four disciplines to gain insights into how they mark student assignments.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
