ABSTRACT
The phrase ‘meaningful feedback’ may seem oxymoronic, but we’ve seen in the course of the book that it’s anything but. Like beauty, ‘meaningful’ is in the eye of the beholder. In Chapter 4, a graduate student, Kailin Liu, reports on her M.A. thesis in which she looks at the concept from the perspective of her informants – graduate students like herself. In the same chapter, Julie tells of spending an inordinate amount of time providing meaningful feedback to students on their assignments. She notes that many students have low expectations when it comes to meaningful feedback. In this chapter, we interrogate the question of meaningful feedback from the perspective of both students and teachers. Meaningful feedback is crucial to producing quality writing. This is as true for professional authors as it is for students. Regardless of one’s experience and expertise, we are writing from the ‘inside out’ and are usually too close to our own work to have an independent perspective on it. We suggest that meaningful feedback will contain both critical but also positive comments but will also offer advice to the writer on how they might improve problematic aspects of their text. From interviews we learn that meaningful feedback has an important affective dimension for students: it tells them that their work is taken seriously and valued.
