Exploring the Perceptions of Graduate Students About Formative Feedback Strategies on Their Written Assignments at Higher Education

Expertise in academic writing provides opportunities to the graduate students to produce high quality papers and assignments for successful completion of their graduates' courses. Therefore, formative feedback strategies helped students to produce quality assignments. The study has highlighted several factors that impede the process of feedback. Understanding these factors, therefore, was integral in helping students to improve their written assignments at the graduate level. This study aimed to explore graduate students' perceptions about formative feedback strategies on their written assignments in a public sector university in Pakistan. Six students from the final cohort of the four-year B.Ed. programme were selected purposefully as primary participants and two teachers; one Assistant professor and one senior Lecturer were selected as secondary participants. Data generated from teachers' interviews helped in triangulation of the findings. In addition, data collection tools were document analysis, interviews from teachers and focus group discussion with students. The data were analyzed based on Creswell's model of analysis (2013) that dealt with organization of the raw data, general sense making, codification and identification of emerging themes. Moreover, there is a continuous back and forth approach by reading and rereading the data repeatedly. The study revealed that students perceived teachers' feedback on their writing as incredibly important for the quality of their written assignments. They were of the view that teachers were using different forms of formative feedback strategies such as debriefing conferences, corrective and directive feedback, facilitative feedback and peer feedback. Furthermore, the entire discourse also revealed few important hindering factors such as teachers' workload, teachers' lack of competency, lack of permanent teaching faculty, and institutional policy. Moreover, the students articulated concerns such as teachers were reluctant and not professionally equipped to provide effective feedback on their writing specimens. The findings have implications for teachers to think and rethink about their feedback strategies in classroom particularl producing well-written assignments for a graduate course. In other hand, students are also need to understand the improtance of peer and self assessment than that to rely on teachers feedback for all the time. Moreover, Roushan University needs to make formative feedback as an integral part of the policy framework to focus of the development of graduate students' writing skills to meet the demands of a graduate course.