Grade Six Teachers’ Feedback on Girls’ and Boys’ Narrative and Persuasive Writing

Abstract

This study extends previous work examining teachers’ written feedback on students’ writing from postsecondary into elementary contexts. The objective was to determine the influence of genre and gender on teachers’ written feedback to sixth-grade authors of narrative and persuasive writing. We considered the quantity of comments and corrections, as well as the focus and mode of comments written by 108 teachers on four pieces of writing composed by two students. There were significant differences between comments directed to the two types of writing. Process, conventions, artistic style, and format were the focus of significantly greater numbers of comments directed to narrative writing than to persuasive writing. In contrast, meaning, organization, effort, and ideology were emphasized to a greater degree when teachers responded to persuasive writing than to narrative writing. There were also gender differences: Teachers tended to indicate and make greater numbers of corrections on writing attributed to boys, and to provide more criticisms and lessons, explanations and suggestions when the work was attributed to a male writer. Female teachers focused on conventions and organization in contrast to male teachers’ tendency to focus more on artistic style. In addition, female teachers generally wrote greater numbers of comments and tended to indicate and make more corrections than did male teachers. Our findings indicated a correlation between convention errors and the number and types of comments, as well as teachers’ reluctance to engage with the ideologies in students’ writing