Students need feedback from instructors to learn from their mistakes and improve their academic skills. Responding to student writing is a central and necessary component of the instructor-student feedback loop. There are many forms of feedback on written assignments, and not all of them have the same role in supporting student learning. For…

Rubrics are often used as tools for criteria-based assessments. Although students indicate that they appreciate comments given as feedback which make reference to the rubric and provided in addition to it, there is little information on how this type of feedback actually differs from in-text comments with respect to focus, level, and function of…

This article reports an initiative to improve student writing by incorporating technology-based structured peer review in the revision process. Although the most important step of writing, the revision step, is overlooked by students for several reasons. We describe a successful 10-week long intervention with students from upper-level…

Peer review is an established strategy for improving the quality of students' writing. This study moves beyond the focus on outcomes to assess the peer-review process. In particular, this study focuses on the timing of the peer review, a highly structured feedback form, and student writers' revisions after engaging in peer review. This study draws…

Educators and researchers are increasingly calling for the processes of writing and knowledge construction to be an integral part of disciplinary learning. This article contributes to the literature by presenting an empirical analysis of a programme that was designed to expose students to the complexities of academic practices in conjunction with…