“A Help to Help Yourself” : A study on feedback and error corrections in Swedish upper-secondary students’ English essays

Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to investigate different types of feedback and how they are used in schools, and to see which of them are preferred when it comes to error correction. Feedback is used in schools every day even though it is difficult to know if students really learn from it. Students tend to only glance briefly at the paper or test when it is returned and then throw it away. They are interested in how they scored but not really in how to improve their errors until next time. In this study, students wrote essays which were corrected with four different types of feedback and handed back to the students. The students got a chance to revise them and then the result was analyzed. The students were also given a questionnaire in order for me to find out what kind of feedback they liked the most and compare it to the result of the essay corrections. The different feedback types worked well with different students in general, although, underlining with description did not only work best, it was also chosen as the best type by most students. They seemed to think that this type was good for learning something from the feedback. Most students wanted to look for errors themselves instead of getting the correct answer from the teacher.