Percepciones sobre retroalimentación remota para la escritura académica de estudiantes de postgrado. Un estudio de caso

Abstract

Abstract One of the difficulties generated in the context of confinement due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was the feedback process for written production at the graduate level. This has an essential role in learning, not only regarding the perception of feedback, i.e., giving feedback once the student's work is concluded; but also in the feedforward process that involves accompanying the development of writing by detecting and correcting mistakes (Canabal and Margalef, 2017; Navarro, 2020). As Ahshan (2021) points out, the pandemic forced active teaching and learning strategies to become remote, both synchronous and asynchronous, mediated by educational technologies and platforms for learning management. During the pandemic, the learning of the academic writing process was affected as well. This is a process that already involves different challenges to mediate its elaboration (Carlino, 2013), whether with undergraduate or graduate students (Sabaj et al., 2011). Regarding this obstacle, literature suggests the application of rhetorical moves (Swales, 1990) and genres pedagogy (Venegas et al., 2015; Venegas et al., 2016) as a contribution that facilitates the development of final thesis works. Based on the aforementioned, the question arises: How did the group of graduate students perceive remote feedback from teachers, regarding writing practices, during the elaboration process of the qualitative research project? Therefore, the aim of the study was to understand the perception of remote feedback on writing practices that graduate students received from teachers during the elaboration of the qualitative research project. In order to provide a methodological response, a qualitative, descriptive-phenomenological research was proposed through a case study.The participants were students from the 2018 and 2019 cohorts who took the qualitative analysis elective course of a doctoral education program from a Chilean public university. The classes included group and individual feedback of the writing practices of the qualitative research project, through synchronous educational technologies such as the Zoom platform and Google meet; and also, asynchronous ones such as Ucampus, Youtube and email. Two focus groups were conducted, whose corpus was analyzed under the inspiration of grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin, 2002) with the assistance of Atlas Ti software. Informed consents were applied as ethical criteria for the research.The findings indicate a positive valuation by the students of both the feedback provided through different virtual resources and the modeling of the writing process of the project from video capsules. Furthermore, the asynchronous interactions allowed the prompt communication of the rubrics, before and after the evaluation process. The thematic relevance stands out, having collected the needs of the participants themselves, and the in-depth application of a critical analysis contributed by the group work of a community of researchers in training, which contrasts with the traditional academic training of postgraduate students.