Responding to student writing: Teachers’ philosophies and practices

• Studies college writing instructors’ approaches to response to student writing.
• Goes beyond teacher written commentary to consider other response strategies (peer review, conferences).
• Asks not only what teachers do in response but why they do it and where their philosophies were formed.
• Mixed-methods design that includes surveys, interviews, analysis of teacher comments on student texts, and case study narratives.

Reviewers and researchers have been investigating response to student writing for several decades. To what extent have these research findings influenced teachers’ real-world practices? Beyond investigating teachers’ mechanisms for providing feedback, this study aimed to examine what is behind those choices: What principles guide teachers, and how were those philosophies formed? Do their practices appear to be consistent with their views about response? The teachers’ voices have been the missing link in the research base to date. There have been surveys of student opinion about response and text analyses of teachers’ comments, but only rarely have teachers themselves been utilized as primary informants in studies on response.The present study utilized a mixed-methods approach to examine the research questions. A team of researchers surveyed (N = 129) and interviewed (N = 23) community college and university writing instructors from the same geographic region—volunteers who had responded to an online survey—about a wide range of practices and analyzed examples (3–5 texts per interview participant) of these informants’ written responses to students. The results showed variation across instructors and some discontinuity between teachers’ self-reported response principles and their actual practices, as demonstrated in their own written commentary.