This study undertakes a quantitative, comparative study of instructor feedback on
essays. The ubiquity of word processors in the classroom for both students and instructors has led to new situations where instructors give students feedback through comments directly embedded in electronic files, generated through Microsoft Word.
247 essays were collected in total, across two distinct phases of the study. 93
essays were collected in Phase One, with the remaining 154 essays collected in Phase
Two. These essays reflected comments written by a total of 14 instructors, of whom four wrote comments electronically, six wrote comments traditionally (via hand writing on paper copies of essays), and four wrote comments in both styles. These comments were coded according to a rubric adapted from Kwangsu Cho et al. (2006) to determine broad categories such as Directive, Non-Directive, Praise, Criticism, and Off-Topic. Measures such as average comment length and number of comments per page were also examined.
Early findings in Phase One indicated that electronic comments tended to generate more comments per page, longer comments by word count (approximately 50% in both categories when compared to traditional comments), more Directive comment, and fewer Non-Directive comments. However, Phase Two research showed that only the comment length proved consistent across all instructors.
Re-framing the study in terms of individual instructor profiles offers a way to utilize these research techniques in a way that provides a detailed description of how each instructor comments in each style, thereby giving those instructors the ability to tailor
their comments to each specific student.