Second language (L2) writing is a subfield within the field of applied linguistics concerned with applying knowledge and insights from linguistics, psychology, and education to develop teaching approaches for those who need to acquire L2 writing skills for academic or work purposes (Belcher, 2012). Much research on L2 writers over the past five decades has been focused on students in university contexts (Ferris, 2018) in part because universities are often not equipped to meet students’ needs for academic writing support in writing courses (Cimasko & Reichelt, 2011; Kubota & Abels, 2006). One student need pertains to the learning of discourse organization to create coherent text. This issue is of particular concern to EFL undergraduates who often experience difficulty with organizational patterns when writing in English (Tang, 2012).In response to this student need, the current study investigated the effectiveness of the explicit teaching of coherence in EFL undergraduates’ research writing in English with a pre- and post-intervention embedded mixed-methods design of three study groups of Japanese undergraduate students. More specifically, the study involved two experimental groups—a process-genre group and process-writing group—and a comparison group. The teaching program for these three groups differed in the combination of classroom instruction (i.e., coherence-focused process-genre approach or process writing) and written teacher feedback (i.e., coherence-focused or meaning-focused) they received. A total of 36 third-year female undergraduate English majors participated in this study. Writing samples were collected at three points throughout one semester and analyzed based on three measures of writing coherence: reader-based logical development, reader-based cohesion, and text-based coherence. The reader-based measures of an analytic rubric were used by human raters in evaluating reader-based coherence in the writing samples. Rasch measurement was used to assess the rubric’s functioning via a Rasch principal components analysis (Linacre, 2019). In addition, the Rasch model was used to identify raters who were too lenient or too severe and calculate fair average measures of the ratings using Many-Facets Rasch analysis (Linacre, 2014). These ratings were then analyzed and investigated for changes across time and between groups. The text-based coherence measure for each writing sample was obtained via a form of textual analysis called topical structure analysis. Mixed-design ANOVAs were used to analyze the three measures to investigate statistical differences within-group and between-groups differences. In addition, a Pearson’s correlation analysis was conducted to investigate if raters’ assessment of logicality correlates with their assessment of cohesion usage in student samples of research writing. Results from the statistical analyses revealed that the process-genre group was the only group out of all three groups in this study to have made statistically significant improvements on coherence in their research writing during the course of study. To help explain the results of the statistical analyses, qualitative data collected from background questionnaires, rater’s questionnaires, reflective journals, and student interviews were coded and analyzed. The findings indicated that the process-genre group was able to develop coherence at the sentence, paragraph, and discourse levels. Further, a comparison of the results from both the reader-based and text-based perspectives of coherence suggested that coherence development achieved by the process-genre group (i.e., improvement in both logical development and cohesion) was due to the treatment they received as observations from their background questionnaire reflective journal responses and interview data suggested that they appeared to be unaware of the concept of coherence prior to the study. However, as the treatment started, they gradually acquired knowledge and skills for creating coherence, first at the sentence level, then at the paragraph level, and toward the end of the study, at the discourse level. The improvements made by the process-genre group appeared to be related to the changes observed in their perception of coherence throughout the treatment period. The qualitative findings indicated that their perceptions changed from a focus on the relevance of information included in their writing in the beginning of the treatment period to an expanded understanding of coherence as a genre-specific concept that is important in making their writing reader-friendly by using both local and global cohesion and coherence devices. As to the other two groups in this study, the qualitative findings from the background questionnaire responses and interview data suggested that unlike the process-genre group, the process writing group’s coherence development was limited to the sentence and paragraph levels, and that of the comparison group only at the sentence level. The fact that these two groups failed to develop their knowledge and skills in writing coherently at the discourse level might explain the non-significant statistical results for the within-group and between-group analyses conducted with those groups. In sum, the findings showed that the development of coherence in EFL undergraduate research writing is influenced by writing program design. Particularly, the program needs to explicitly teach coherence through a systematically designed curriculum that includes the teaching of both useful genre knowledge and skills for writing coherently. In addition to teaching the textual construction of coherence, because coherence is a reader-based concept, its crucial role in producing research writing that is logical in the eyes of readers also needs to be reinforced in the teacher feedback given to learners. Such a program where both the instruction and the teacher feedback are focused on form (i.e., coherence in research writing) enables learners to improve coherence in their writing as they progress through the drafting cycle of writing and revising in the program. / Teaching & Learning

In this mixed methods research study, I use student survey and interview data from English 11 students at a suburban, public high school to analyze the ways in which students' self-efficacy is impacted when a feedback intervention is introduced that creates the opportunity for students to ask questions about their writing. In this study, I found that as a result of the intervention students showed an increase in their writer-centered efficacy beliefs, reported an awareness of the control and autonomy the intervention provided, and expressed an appreciation for the ways in which teacher feedback can be useful in helping them develop their writing skills. These findings provide writing teachers with several implications for the ways in which traditional feedback methods may not be serving students' efficacy needs and proposes an alternative approach to offering students feedback on their writing.

In this two-part dissertation, the sources of self-efficacy were investigated for elementary and middle school students in mathematics classrooms. In the first study, the Sources of Middle School Mathematics Scale (Usher & Pajares, 2009) was validated with a younger sample. Participants included 367 fourth- through sixth-grade students; these participants completed two surveys investigating their beliefs regarding their capabilities to perform successfully in mathematics. This study included an examination of the psychometric properties and a confirmatory factor analysis of the Sources of Middle School Mathematics Self-Efficacy Scale, and an investigation into the relative power of mastery experience, vicarious experience, social persuasions, and physiological state to predict self-efficacy. This scale demonstrates adequate reliability and validity to be used successfully with younger students. The goal of the second study was to examine social persuasions in greater detail by focusing on the feedback teachers provide to their students during mathematics instruction. The Teacher Feedback Scale (Burnett, 2002) and several self-efficacy measures were administered at two time points to a subset (N = 290) of the fourth- through sixth-grade students from Study 1. The reliability and validity of the Teacher Feedback Scale was explored, as well as the relative power of positive, negative, ability, and effort feedback to predict self-efficacy. Negative feedback was the strongest predictor of student mathematics self-efficacy; positive and ability feedback were also significant predictors. Effort feedback was not a significant predictor of self-efficacy. This dissertation makes a relevant contribution to the fields of educational and school psychology by providing additional evidence for the validity of these scales and by exploring teacher feedback through the lens of social cognitive theory. Results from this study can also be used to help mathematics teachers interact with their students in ways that will bolster self-efficacy.

While studies have shown that teacher and peer feedback are beneficial to students, research has also found that teachers can appropriate students' texts in their feedback, taking away authorship in the process (Brannon & Knoblauch, 1982; Goldstein, 2004). The present study addressed the type of written feedback that I gave my ESL composition students and the type of feedback they gave each other during the writing process, and it examined their responses to the feedback they received. As the response stance taken when providing feedback is a determiner of the level of control the feedback conveys (Straub & Lunsford, 1995), I investigated the stances that both I and my students took while providing feedback. Since my goal had been to avoid text appropriation, I wanted to learn if I was successful in taking a less controlling stance in the feedback that I gave to my students. In addition, I wanted to discover whether the stance my students took while giving feedback would change over the course of the semester. Further, I used a consciousness-raising pedagogical tool — the Cover Sheet — to examine the responses of the students to the feedback to determine if they thought critically about the feedback they had received. At the end of the study, I discovered that my intention to only provide feedback that was not considered controlling was too idealistic and that at least for ESL students, it is easier to understand feedback if it is more direct. Additionally, I found that those students who had an easier time understanding the feedback I gave them and used it to revise their papers ended up getting a higher grade in the course.

The study investigated the impacts of different strategies of providing teacher written corrective feedback on first semester ESL/EFL students’ writing accuracy and writing quality. Four feedback strategies (indirect feedback, direct feedback, indirect feedback followed by direct feedback with explicit corrective comments, and no feedback) were employed in this study. One hundred twenty-one EFL freshman university students were randomly assigned into four feedback groups (IF, DF, IDECC, NF). Students in each group produced two narrative essays. Teacher feedback was provided in two segments for the first essay and students made two revisions based on the feedback. The errors on each stage of students’ writing were marked and counted to be compared among each stage of the writing and between groups. The results of data analysis showed that the mean number of errors in all three treatment groups decreased in each writing stage. All three treatment groups outperformed the no-feedback control group in each stage of writing in terms of grammatical accuracy and writing quality. There was no difference in the mean number of errors among three treatment groups in the first and second revisions. However, the IDECC group, who received indirect feedback followed by direct feedback with explicit corrective comments, outperformed all other groups in the second revision and in the new essay. The results also showed that the mean number of errors of all three treatment groups decreased in the new essay indicating that there was a long-term effect of teacher corrective feedback on the new essay. The results of the study suggest that providing teacher corrective feedback was effective in reducing students’ grammatical errors on their essays. All three treatment groups also gained in writing quality scores in the new essay indicating that, to a certain extent, there was an effect of teacher corrective feedback on writing quality. The findings are discussed in the context of the related literature. Areas of future research are discussed and practical implications are suggested. / Ph. D.

Several empirical studies have suggested that self-monitoring is an effective strategy to increase appropriate behavior in children and adults with developmental disabilities. Results of a comprehensive review of self-monitoring research with people who have developmental disabilities revealed that 71% of the participants were trained by researchers. However, researchers are not typical intervention agents. To ensure that people who are typically in the participant’s environment (e.g., teachers, parents, caregivers) can effectively teach people with developmental disabilities to self-monitor and that this in turn will change the participant’s behavior, it is important that research examine the effectiveness of self-monitoring when the training is provided by typical intervention agents. Thus, the purpose of this dissertation study was to investigate the effects of a self-monitoring intervention package on both teacher and student behavior in the classroom. The self-monitoring intervention package consisted of training teachers to use self-monitoring, providing feedback on the self-monitoring intervention developed by the teacher, providing feedback to teachers while training the student to self-monitor, and providing feedback to teachers while they implemented the self-monitoring intervention in the classroom. During intervention, the researchers provided feedback to teachers to ensure that teachers were correctly instructing the students to self-monitor. Teachers then implemented the self-monitoring intervention without researcher feedback (maintenance). Teachers required very little to no feedback after the self-monitoring training, feedback on the self-monitoring intervention they developed, and student self-monitoring training. The researcher provided immediate feedback during the first session when the self-monitoring intervention was implemented in the classroom to ensure the teachers implemented the self-monitoring intervention with fidelity. Rate of inappropriate sitting decreased for all students after the self-monitoring intervention was introduced, and the percentage of non-overlapping data metric values indicated that the self-monitoring interventions were highly effective for three participants and effective for one participant. Some teachers and some students generalized the use of self-monitoring interventions to other activities, students, and target behaviors. Social validity measures indicate that self-monitoring interventions for young children with developmental disabilities are socially important. / text

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The purpose of this study was to examine the effect that a writing teacher's written comments had on improvement in L2 writing; whether the types of changes students made in their drafts after teacher comments were substantial at the content level and/or language level; to what extent the focus (content- and language-focused) and the directness (direct and indirect) of teacher feedback predicted improvement in L2 writing; and the teacher's and students' attitudes toward and perception of good writing and the role of teacher comments. The study had three major components. First, a quantitative study was conducted to examine the rate of students' successful revisions in response to the teacher written feedback. Using descriptive statistics, it was found that students revised more successfully in response to language-focused comments and direct comments than in response to content-focused comments and indirect comments. The next phase of the study investigated how the focus and directness of teacher comments resulted in and predicted improvement in writing. Using paired sample t-tests, it was found that teacher's comments on student drafts did lead to overall improvement in the grades on the revised essays. Employing hierarchical regressions, it was also found that higher rates of successful revision in response to content-focused comments and direct comments resulted in higher grades in the subsequent revisions. Using a one-way repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), it was also found that while students' writing improved significantly for new essay assignments in the area of content, there was no statistically significant improvement in students' linguistic accuracy in their writing over the course of the semester. The final part of the study examined the students' perceived need for teacher feedback and revision, and the teacher's view on writing. Using surveys and interviews, it was found that the teacher and students had different opinions about the role and importance of feedback. The students reported that direct corrections of linguistic errors were less beneficial to them, even though the teacher gave much more direct corrective feedback than indirect feedback over the course of the semester. In addition, while the students expected to have received the grades of each writing assignment, the teacher only commented on the drafts and gave out a single overall grade at the end of semester. The study, using quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze multiple sources of data, presented strong empirical evidence that the content-focused comments and direct comments provided by the teacher contributed to higher grades in the subsequent revisions of the same essay assignment, and that there was no effect of teacher comments, especially direct corrections on linguistic features, on longer-term improvement in L2 writing. These results suggest that when giving written feedback, writing teachers should take into account whether students are developmentally ready to learn the lexical and grammatical forms and structures corrected by teachers. The study, designed as longitudinal study in a real world setting, provided a rich description of the effect of a teacher's commenting practice and L2 writers' revision behaviors. / CITE/Language Arts

教師回饋在學生的寫作過程中是很重要的，所以如何給予有效的回饋是個值得探討的議題。這個研究是在評估老師的書面回饋對於高中生多次文稿英文寫作練習的成效。桃園市某所國立高中的高三學生，一班共36位 (男生27位，女生9位) 參與這項為期從2007年九月到2008年一月的研究。教師回饋的方式是在第一次文稿上給予代號批改及評語，在第二次文稿上直接寫上正確答案及評語，在第三次文稿上直接給予答案並附上評語。老師不會在每次的文稿上評分，而學生在繳交改寫的文稿時要附上心得單。這項研究包含敘述文體的前測及後測、兩份參與者對教師回饋的問卷、及參與者的訪談。研究結果如下：第一，這種教師回饋對於整體的寫作品質上的進步有所貢獻。第二，雖然這樣的教師回饋對於整體的寫作正確度上沒有明顯的改善，但在時態及標點符號方面卻有正向的影響。第三，參與者對於這樣的教師回饋抱持著正面的態度。最後，討論此研究在教學上的意涵及對未來研究的建議。 / Teacher feedback is important in students’ writing process, so how to give effective teacher feedback is an issue worth investigation. The present study assessed the effect of teacher written feedback on high school students’ multi-draft English writing practice. A class of 36 seniors (27 boys and 9 girls) in a national senior high school in Taoyuan City participated in this study from Sep. 2007 through Jan. 2008. The teacher feedback was to give coded correction and comments on Draft 1, to offer direct correction and comments on Draft 2, and to provide direct correction and comments on Draft 3. Grades were assigned randomly and the participants had to submit cover sheets in revision. The study included the pre-test and the post-test on narrative writing, two questionnaires on the participants’ perceptions of the teacher feedback, and interviews. The results are as follows: First, this teacher feedback contributed to significant improvement in the overall writing quality. Second, this teacher feedback yielded no significant difference in the overall writing accuracy, but it had some positive effect on tense and punctuation. Third, the participants took a positive attitude toward this teacher feedback. Finally, some implications for teaching and suggestions for future research were discussed.

Die Dissertation untersucht Leistungserwartungen von Lehrkräften. Teilstudie 1 und 2 gehen der Frage nach, welche Merkmale von Schüler*innen Lehrkräfte in ihre Erwartungen an die Leistungen von Lernenden einbeziehen. Teilstudie 3 untersucht, welche Bedeutung inakkurat hohe oder niedrige Leistungserwartungen von Lehrkräften für ihr unterrichtliches Handeln und für die Leistungsentwicklungen der Lernenden haben. Die Analysen basieren auf Daten der Längsschnittstudie „Kompetenzerwerb und Lernvoraussetzungen“, an der im Schuljahr 2013/2014 insgesamt 1065 Schüler*innen aus 64 ersten Grundschulklassen teilgenommen haben. Teilstudie 1 ergab, dass Erwartungen von Lehrkräften an die sprachlichen und mathematischen Leistungen von Erstklässler*innen in Abhängigkeit vom ethnischen Hintergrund, sozialen Hintergrund und Geschlecht der Lernenden variieren. Diese Unterschiede blieben zum Teil auch nach Kontrolle der Ausgangsfähigkeiten und selbsteingeschätzten Motivation der Schüler*innen bestehen und kennzeichnen daher Verzerrungen. Den Ergebnissen von Teilstudie 2 zufolge gehen solche sozialen und geschlechtsbezogenen Verzerrungen zum Teil auf Lehrkrafteinschätzungen der Motivation und des Arbeitsverhaltens zurück. Ethnische Verzerrungen bestanden hingegen unabhängig von diesen Lehrkrafteinschätzungen. Dass inakkurat hohe oder niedrige Leistungserwartungen die Leistungsentwicklung von Lernenden bereits im ersten Grundschuljahr beeinflussen können, zeigten die Ergebnisse der Teilstudie 3. Die zugehörige Videostudie ergab, dass sich inakkurate Leistungserwartungen von Lehrkräften in ihrem Feedbackverhalten niederschlagen. Eine bedeutsame Mediation der Erwartungseffekte durch das Feedback ließ sich aber nicht nachweisen. Die Befunde der Dissertation sind für die pädagogische Praxis sehr relevant. Sie sprechen einerseits für den Vorteil hoher Erwartungen und sensibilisieren andererseits für das Risiko verzerrender Einflüsse von Hintergrundmerkmalen der Schüler*innen. / The dissertation deals with teacher expectations for student achievement. The first two studies investigate student characteristics teachers rely on when forming their achievement expectations. Study 3 investigates the associations of inaccurately high or low teacher expectations with their teaching behavior and students’ subsequent achievement development. The analyses are based on data from the longitudinal research project “competence acquisition and learning preconditions” in which 1065 students from 64 first grade classes participated in the school year 2013/2014. Study 1 revealed that teachers’ expectations for students’ language and mathematics achievement differed depending on students’ ethnic background, social background and gender. These differences partly persisted even after controlling for students’ actual achievement, general cognitive abilities and motivation, and therefore indicate biased expectations. The results of study 2 showed that social bias and gender bias in teacher expectations were partly due to differences in teachers’ perceptions of students’ motivation and learning behavior. Ethnic bias, however, appeared independent of these teacher perceptions. The results of study 3 support the assumption that inaccurately high or low teacher expectations may result in self-fulfilling prophecies and influence students’ achievement development as early as in the first school grade. The video study of study 3 further revealed that inaccurately high or low teacher expectations may result in different teacher feedback for the students. Teacher feedback, however, did not substantially mediate teacher expectancy effects on student achievement. The results of the present dissertation are of great relevance for educational practice. First, they highlight the advantages of high expectations and, second, they sensitize for biasing influences of student background characteristics.