Issue 11, Spring 2006
TELL @ ELI Archive

Action Research:
Hand-written vs. Audio-Recorded Feedback on Students' Papers

Introduction

When teaching an EFL/ESL academic writing class, it is often the case that teachers provide extensive feedback on their students' papers in the process of multiple revisions. With a class of 20 students, providing hand-written feedback multiple times on a single paper per student might be a challenge for some teachers. To make matters worse, the teacher's hand writing may not always be clear to the students; hence, additional oral comments are sometimes in order when a student asks for clarification.

The following is a mini-report on an action research study that investigated advantages and disadvantages of two types of feedback on students' written assignments: hand-written and audio-recorded. The main purpose behind this research was to find a more efficient way of providing such feedback without impeding the development of students' writing skills and their overall learning process.

Two questions guided the study:

1. Which of the two types of feedback: hand-written or audio-recorded is more efficient in terms of time spent per paper?
   
2. What are the students' perceptions of the two types of feedback: hand-written and audio-recorded in terms of:

.....a. comprehensibility of feedback
.....b. ease of correction
.....c. amount of detail in feedback

Methodology

Participants

Sixteen students participated in this study, all attending the same class: Writing IV. The students had a wide age range - 19 and 48 with the mean of 23.8. They represented eight countries: Brazil, Colombia, Haiti, Jordan, Korea, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. There were 5 female and 10 male students.

Procedure

Draft versions of two writing assignments were used in this study: a compare/contrast essay and a term paper (4-10 page research paper). Both papers were given the two kinds of feedback; for some students it was hand-written (see a sample in Adobe Acrobat - 112 Kb) and for others - audio-recorded (see an abridged sample in MS Word - 2.6 Mb). For the audio-recorded feedback, the Insert Voice function in Microsoft Word was used, so no additional software of hardware was required either for the instructor or the students. The time spent on providing feedback for each paper and the length of every paper were recorded.

After the students received all their papers and revised them considering the feedback provided, a survey was administered to find out the students' perceptions about the two types of feedback they had received. The survey was completed by each individual student online as part of in-class activities.

Results

Given the fact that this study has been conducted as action research, no attempts have been made to generalize the quantitative results. Hence, to answer the research questions in this study, descriptive statistics have been employed.

Efficiency of Providing Feedback

There were 10 papers with hand-written comments, totaling to 45 pages. Audio-recorded comments were given to 17 papers, totaling to 35.8 pages. The table below shows the average amount of time spent on each type feedback (Table 1).

Table 1

As clearly seen from the results, the time spent on audio-recorded comments was almost triple the amount of the hand-written comments. In other words, time-wise, the hand-written comments are much more efficient than the audio-recorded ones.

Students' Perceptions

Each question below was rated on a 4-point Likert scale (4 - most positive and 1 - most negative). This would make the midpoint (neutral opinion) on this scale equal 2.5. The students' perceptions regarding the two types of feedback show strong preference for the audio-recorded feedback.

Table 2

Regarding comprehensibility of feedback, students strongly indicated the preference for audio-recorded comments and almost as strongly expressed their disfavor for hand-written comments (3.50 vs. 1.93 with the midpoint being 2.50).

Further, ease of correction with the audio-recorded comments was considerably higher than for the hand-written comments (3.38 vs. 2.50). Once again, hand-written comments were not rated necessarily negatively since 2.50 is exactly the midpoint in the given scale. It may be worthwhile, at this point, to cite one of the students from the open-ended question in the survey:

audio recorded is much better and easier,but hand-written is also necessary in case if we need to correct our homework at home.

A possible explanation for this relatively lower rating of the ease of use the audio-recorded comments is the size of the files with the recordings. Audio-recorded comments are quite large in size (3 - 10Mb per page). This might have created additional inconvenience in that students could no longer easily work on their paper on their home computers. Such file would not fit on a floppy disk, nor could it be emailed easily.

As far as amount of detail in feedback is concerned, once again audio-recorded comments seemed to be more popular among students than the hand-written ones (3.5 vs. 2.94). However, it should be noted that the hand-written comments overall received positive reaction too.

Finally, the question that inquired about the students' overall preference of one type of feedback over the other showed that the majority of students prefer hand-written feedback: hand-written - 18.8% and audio-recorded - 81.3%. To provide more qualitative data regarding this question, see some of the students' responses to the open-ended question:

hearing voice comments is much esayer to understand and more clear than the hand-writteng comments. If it was possible, please use the comments on microsoft word [audio-recorded comments]

Both, hand written and recorded, were great. thanks for the new way of correcting our paper, it is really great.

the audio feedback is much usefull to me.

Using the audio recorder is much easier and more automated in a way to modify the comments […]

Conclusion

Overall, the findings of this study do not unequivocally demonstrate the advantage or disadvantage of audio-recorded comments over the traditional hand-written ones. Clearly, audio-recorded comments are not a solution to save the teacher's paper grading time. However, there appears to be a strong indication that audio-recorded comments are considerably better received by the students in all 3 respects: comprehensibility of feedback, amount of detail in feedback, ease of correction. It should be noted too, that the quality of audio-recorded and hand-written feedback will most likely vary from teacher to teacher. In this specific study, the instructor's handwriting was often incomprehensible, which must have significantly affected the students' responses.

Now that these advantages and disadvantages are established, it would be interesting to see whether these two types of feedback make any difference in terms of learning gains that students make. These gains can be explored in terms of potential improved performance in writing and possibly listening since there is much meaning-focused listening is involved with audio-recorded feedback. This might be a purpose of another study.

TELL@ELI Issue 11, Spring 2006

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