The Focus of Supervisor Written Feedback to Thesis/Dissertation Students

By J. Bitchener, Helen Basturkmen, Martin East. 2010

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Written feedback on drafts of a thesis or dissertation is arguably the most important source of input on what is required or expected of thesis-writing students by the academic community. Despite its importance, relatively little is known about what type of information supervisors focus on when giving feedback. This article presents the findings of an exploratory, descriptive study that investigated what supervisors said they focused on when giving feedback. A total of 35 supervisors across three disciplines (Humanities, Sciences/ Mathematics, Commerce) at six New Zealand universities participated in the study. Data were sought from self –report data (written questionnaires and interviews) and samples of feedback given on thesis drafts. The study found that a wide range of beliefs concerning feedback are held by supervisors, that there is little difference in the type of feedback provided by supervisors in the different disciplines and that similar feedback tends to be given to both L1 and L2 students.

Subfields: Education, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a1c90bdab3c45663fe1ac95e7cfa860562fa89cb

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. Icy Lee
2. Shulin Yu
3. Yao Zheng
4. Helen Basturkmen
5. Martin East
6. Limin Zhang
7. J. Bitchener
8. Kaihao Yuan

In General Health Professions

1. Icy Lee
2. Martin East
3. Helen Basturkmen
4. J. Bitchener

Citations in the corpus

• Understanding student engagement with peer feedback on master’s theses: a Macau study (2019, background): “…and pedagogical discussions on master’s students’ engagement with peer feedback in academic writing, thus shedding light on peer feedback as an effective pedagogical tool at the master’s level (Anderson, Day, and McLaughlin 2006; Bitchener, Basturkmen, and East 2010; Li, Hyland, and Hu 2017).”
• Peer feedback in second language writing (2005–2014) (2016, background): “Although there are a few studies on teacher feedback/supervisor feedback on postgraduates and doctoral students’ L2 writing (Bitchener & Basturkmen 2010; Kumar & Stracke 2011; Yu & Lee 2013), less research has been conducted to explore peer feedback in L2 academic and scholarly writing (Chen 2010;…”
• Supervisors' on-script feedback comments on drafts of dissertations: socialising students into the academic discourse community (2014, background): “Analysis of data relating to the supervisors’ perspectives and reported practices (Bitchener, Basturkmen, and East 2010) concluded that although supervisors held a range of beliefs about what constituted effective feedback there was little difference in the types of feedback they reported providing…”