Building Student Portfolio Around Teacher's Feedback: Evidence-Based Cognitive Apprenticeship

Campbell-Thomson, O. and Al Haffar, D. (2020) Building Student Portfolio Around Teacher's Feedback: Evidence-Based Cognitive Apprenticeship. 5th Annual Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Annual Conference, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 08 Jan 2020.

Abstract

This presentation reports on the practice of building a student portfolio comprising a sequence of artefacts which aim to reveal the process of skill development in an English-language module. The academic goal is for students to master the skills of writing focused, coherent and critical paragraphs. Portfolio requirements include presentation of teacher's feedback on students' assignments, students' responses and follow-up tasks, as evidence of the 'process' of student-teacher collaborative work towards meeting the intended goal. Teacher's feedback and students' responses to the feedback are the units of analysis in this case study which pursues two interrelated objectives: (1) to establish theoretical parameters of the notion teacher's feedback, and (2) to examine the impact of teacher's feedback on the process of critical writing skills development. Theoretical framework of this case study is based on the cognitive apprenticeship model. The concept of cognitive apprenticeship, introduced by Collins, Brown and Newman (1989), emphasizes the importance of the process in mastering the skill, where systematic guidance is provided by the teacher. Cognitive aspect specifically relates to thinking processes which are not always observable. Teacher-student display of their work in a portfolio collection is used as instances of 'visible' evidence of the process of cognition in developing critical writing skills. The categories of instructing, questioning, modeling, feeding back, cognitive structuring and contingency management, drawn from literature on cognitive appreticeship, help conceptualize the notion of teacher's feedback, and also provide useful reference points for the empirical part of the study. The data for the empirical investigation are drawn from the portfolio samples collected from twenty-two first-year college students. The method of thematic content analysis (TCA) is employed to identify prominent themes and patterns in teacher's feedback, and in students' responses. The phases of a selected TCA are managed by a software-aided analysis ATLAS.ti. Five complete portfolio samples are chosen for an in-depth qualitative analysis to assess the progress in critical writing skill against the evaluation rubric used to assess the writing task. The findings of the study indicate that skill development is an iterative process. Repetitive modeling, and the use of specific examples to illustrate the point made in a teacher's comment, were shown to be the most effective types of feedback; their effectiveness was demonstrated both in students' follow-up tasks (implicit evidence) and students' reflections on the value of different types of teacher's feedback (explicit evidence). The findings have implications for pedagogical practice by drawing attention to a variety of feedback strategies and their effectiveness, and to students' views on how they are learning and how they would like to learn. Theoretical underpinings of the study offer a productive conceptualization of the process of skill development and of the placement of teacher's feedback in this iterative process.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Campbell-Thomson, Dr Olga
• Authors: Campbell-Thomson, O., and Al Haffar, D.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages and Cultures

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