Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Research on feedback in students’ text so far has mixed results. This study investigated an alternative modality for giving feedback that is, in students’ graphic organizers. The first research question for this study investigated how peer and teacher feedback in the expert and poor writers’ organizers affected the relevance and depth of their revisions. The second research question investigated to what extent information in the pre-writing processes complemented and constrained the expert and poor writers’ transfer of ideas from one pre-writing process to the subsequent pre-writing process and from each pre-writing process to the assignment. The third research question looked at how feedback in the expert and poor writers’ organizers affected their germane, metacognitive, extraneous and intrinsic cognitive loads.

The study was conducted using the teacher action research approach and case study strategy. The participants for the study were first year undergraduate engineering students. The students’ organizers, assignments, responses from the focus group discussion and mental difficulty questionnaires were analyzed to answer the research questions.

The findings for research question one show that the expert writers’ ratio of relevant to non-relevant ideas was consistent while the poor writers’ ratio of relevant to non-relevant ideas improved with feedback. In terms of depth of feedback, 98% of both the expert and poor writers’ revisions were meaning revisions while surface revisions were negligible for all three pre-writing processes. In addition, the expert writers made more self-revisions compared to revisions based on peer or teacher feedback. This might be because they had a clear mental representation of their ideas and could generate many ideas easily. On the other hand, the poor writers were more dependent on teacher feedback and tend to doubt the credibility of their peers’ feedback.

For research questions 2a and 2b, the complementary function of the information in the pre-writing processes motivated the expert and poor writers to choose the main ideas which were more elaborated or had the higher percentage to be transferred. In addition, the constraining function of the information in the pre-writing processes alerted the expert and poor writers not to transfer any ideas that did not match the audience’s needs or writing goal for each pre-writing process. In addition, the findings show that the factors that affected the students’ transfer of ideas from one pre-writing process to the subsequent pre-writing process were similar to the factors that affected the students’ transfer of ideas from each pre-writing process to their essays.

For research question three, the findings show that the expert and poor writers’ germane, metacognitive, extraneous and intrinsic cognitive loads were more similar when the complexity of the task was low but the difference in the expert and poor writers’ germane and metacognitive loads became more evident when the complexity of the task increased. Therefore, in scaffolding students’ composing process, teachers should devote more attention to students’ germane and metacognitive loads.