Critical Analysis of Embedded and Summative Feedback from Online Doctoral Instructors on Benchmark Assessments
Keywords:
faculty feedback; online doctoral programs; embedded feedback; summative feedbackAbstract
Providing transparent written feedback to doctoral students is
essential to the learning process and preparation for the capstone.
Written feedback is even more critical in an online environment where
face-to-face interaction is limited. Two major types of feedback that play
a determining factor to student success are embedded and summative
feedback. Hence, providing students with clear and consistent feedback
on scholarly written course work enhances the writing abilities of
doctoral candidates and prepares them to write their final capstone. The
purpose of this study was to conduct an exploration of faculty feedback
on benchmark written assignments in an online doctoral program. The
researchers examined instructor feedback provided to online doctoral
students on scholarly writing assignments throughout their doctoral
program. The Corpus for this analysis included 236 doctoral level
written assignments that included feedback from approximately 51
faculty members. Student papers were retrieved from all content courses
in the doctoral program. Researchers identified the types and
frequencies of embedded and summative written feedback, while also
developing an analysis of relationships that existed between page length
and embedded feedback. This study sought to accomplish four goals: (1)
Describe the types and frequency of embedded feedback. (2) Describe
the frequency and patterns of faculty summative feedback on student
papers. (3) Analyze if there is a relationship between embedded
feedback and summative feedback. (4) Analyze if there is a relationship
between length of paper and embedded feedback.
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Copyright (c) 2016 Kelley Walters, Patricia Henry
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