"Add punctuation!" How primary school students revise their text in response to teacher feedback

Writing a text is a complex and challenging task that often leads to cognitive overload, especially in beginning writers (Berninger et al. 1992, Negro & Chanquoy 2005). Although providing feedback is a powerful way to support students’ writing, several studies suggest that teacher feedback often fails to meet the specific needs of beginning writers (Bouwer et al.2015, Matusmara et al. 2002). This study examines the ways in which elementary teachers (N=12) provided feedback on their students’ writings (N=116), how this feedback affected the probability and ways in which the students revised their texts, and whether students’ revisions actually improved text quality. Results show that only one third of the teacher feedback was successfully used for revision, and that the quality of the revisions depends on the content and wording of the feedback. When students responded to higher-order feedback (on content, structure, etc.), text quality increased. Furthermore, although negative feedback triggered students to revise more than positive feedback, a higher amount of negative feedback did not improve text quality. Facilitative feedback invited students to revise more, but these revisions actually made the text worse, suggesting that beginning writers need explicit guidance. Implications for the educational practice will be discussed.