Proceedings of The 7th World Conference on Teaching and Education
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Creativity, Feedback, And Students’ Writing of Subject-Specific Texts
Per Blomqvist
ABSTRACT:
This study is part of a larger research project on creativity and writing cultures in upper secondary school in Sweden, with the purpose to explore how feedback practices can be developed to better support students’ writing of subject-specific texts. The purpose of the study is to shed light on how writing has changed over time in the subjects of Social Studies and Swedish, especially regarding changes in the feedback practice in relation to students’ opportunities to take part in creative writing processes that can develop their subject specific-writing. Theoretically, the study is based on concepts and models concerning creativity, writing instructions and formative assessment, especially regarding scaffolding in relation to the development of students’ subject specific writing. The empirical data consists of video recordings of teacher groups’ conversations from five upper secondary schools in Sweden, compromising a total of twenty teachers. The conversations were conducted as so-called collective remembering interviews, a method to stimulate the participants’ memory through social interaction, and focused on addressing issues on how writing assessment has changed over time. Topic analysis was used to analyze the conversations in order to identify common descriptions and expressions among the teachers in each group. The result highlights two different feedback practices that are described as giving students different opportunities to take part in creative writing processes to develop their writing of subject-specific texts. One of the feedback practices is characterized by teachers focusing on explaining to the students what the grading criteria mean and showing sample texts that correspond to a certain grade. The teachers describe that this feedback practice has led to a formalized, instrumental and product-oriented writing culture that has negative consequences for the students’ development of their subject-specific writing, which often lacks independent reasoning, own conclusions and understanding of concepts. The other feedback practice is characterized by students examining text qualities and discussing a variety of sample texts to understand what different texts require. These teachers describe the feedback practice as an exploratory work that leads to more creative writing processes where the students gradually deepen their understanding of subject-specific texts and develop their writing.
keywords: Creativity, Feedback Practice, Formative Assessment, Writing in Upper Secondary School. L1