Searching students’ reflective writing for linguistic correlates of their tendency to ignore instructors’ feedback

Abstract

Students who ignore feedback are poorly positioned to reap its intended benefits. In this study we examined three reflective assignments written by undergraduate Psychology students about their experiences of receiving feedback. We also recorded what proportion of their instructors’ feedback each student had accessed during the first two years of their degree, plus their average grades. Using linguistic text analysis software we searched for linguistic features of students’ reflective writing that were statistically associated with their tendency to ignore instructors’ feedback. We found no meaningful associations between feedback-accessing and students’ language use. Exploratory analyses, however, indicated that a greater tendency to ignore feedback was associated with lower grades, and that students with lower grades tended to focus relatively more on the past or present in their reflections than on the future. We discuss the possible merits of using language as an indirect measure in studies of feedback literacy.