Supervisor’s Feedback and Undergraduate Student’s Uptake in Revising Drafts of Thesis
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UNIVERSITI MALAYSIA SARAWAK
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Supervisory feedback is crucial for students to accomplish their undergraduate theses and learn from the process. Previous studies explored types and focus of supervisory feedback through coding textual and frequency. To date, however, there has been a paucity of research examining how the pragmatic functions of supervisor feedback change during thesis supervision. Little is understood about how supervisor comment influences the rewriting of students. The study investigated supervisor’s feedback and undergraduate student’s uptake in revising drafts of thesis. The objectives of the study were to: (1) examine types of feedback given by supervisors on undergraduate students’ drafts of thesis; (2) examine focus of feedback given by supervisors on undergraduate students’ drafts of thesis; (3) analyse patterns in type and focus of supervisor’s feedback across drafts of undergraduate students’ writing of thesis; and (4) analyse revisions made by undergraduate students in drafts of thesis in response to supervisor’s feedback. The study involved the analysis of 33 drafts from 11 students (three drafts per student). The findings on feedback types show that directive comment was the most frequently used (75.8% of 757 total comment), followed by referential comment (15.7%) and expressive comment (8.5%). The feedback patterns changed across the three drafts. Firstly, the number of comments generally declined by the third draft. In terms of draft stages, the majority of feedback from T1-T11 is high in D1 (41.75%), followed by D2 (39.23%), with a marked reduction in D3 (19.02%). The progressive decline suggests a scaffolding approach in which supervisors initially provide substantial guidance that is gradually withdrawn as students revise their work and show improvement in their writing. In their feedback, supervisors primarily focus on content (57.7%), followed by organization (30.3%) and language (12.0%). Next, the results on revisions made by students shows that the most prevalent type of revision was information expansion (45.5%). It was followed by alteration of form (14.2%) and deletion of information (13.5%). There were less frequent student revisions in the form of reorganization of content (9.0%), coherence (4.0%), self-initiated revisions (5.2%), editing/proofreading (5.2%). There were 25 instances (3.4%) of no revisions. The findings indicate that students showed a high level of responsiveness to supervisor feedback and were able to make revisions, particularly in the domains of content development and language refinement.