How to Use Audio Feedback to Improve Students’ Writing Quality

Curriculum, testing, and administrative demands limit instructional time in modern classrooms (McKeown, FitzPatrick, & Sandmel, 2014); for these reasons, teacher-student conferences and timely personalized feedback are short or rare (Stemper, 2002). Students with learning disabilities, emotional and behavioral disorders, and attention concerns typically do not revise written work, and they make revisions that address surface level features but fail to improve writing quality. When teachers provide timely, individualized feedback, students are supported in making substantive revisions and improving writing scores (Graham, McKeown, Kiuhara, & Harris, 2012) but detailed feedback has the drawback of being laborious and time-consuming. In this article, we propose use of asynchronous audio feedback to support students in substantive revisions based on the results of two prior studies with struggling writers identified with learning disabilities, emotional and behavioral disorders, and attention concerns that resulted in increased revisions and an improvement in overall writing quality. Teachers found the intervention allowed for more individualized, detailed feedback in a shorter period of time. Students enjoyed the individual feedback, self-determined pace, and privacy of asynchronous feedback.