The UTC Graduate School is pleased to announce that Joshua Tucker will present Doctoral (PhD) research titled, Writing Assessment in Tennessee Community Colleges on 10/05/2026 at 2:00 pm ET in Zoom Meeting ID: https://tennessee.zoom.us/j/82323166470. Everyone is invited to attend.
Learning and Leadership
Chair: Dr. Elizabeth K. Crawford
Co-Chair:
Abstract:
This mixed-methods study examined how composition faculty at Tennessee community colleges used margin comments to support student writing, whether those comments reflected principled or novice feedback language, and how instructors understood and described their own commenting practices. Marginal feedback remains the most widely used yet least theoretically examined form of response in first-year writing instruction, and the legislative reforms reshaping Tennessee’s community college system, including the corequisite model, TNPromise, and TNReconnect have intensified questions about the pedagogical practices used to support an increasingly diverse student population. Eight full-time English instructors at Tennessee community colleges participated in the study, submitting 771 feedback items drawn from English 1010 and 1020 essays collected between 2020 and 2023 and completing semi-structured Zoom interviews. Quantitative analysis employed a multinomial logistic regression to examine whether years of teaching experience predicted the character of instructor feedback language. Findings indicated that the mid-career instructor, with nine to 15 years of experience, was significantly more likely to produce principled feedback with comments emphasizing audience, organization, development, and rhetorical purpose than the least experienced participant. The most experienced group showed no significant difference from the reference group, a result attributable to substantial within-group variability. Teaching experience explained approximately 48% of the variance in the cognitive level of feedback, with the mid-career instructor producing predominantly Resource-level feedback addressing the cognitive demands of the writing task, and the most experienced group producing predominantly Process-level feedback focused on observable writing features. Qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews employed a blended abductive coding approach and yielded seven themes: feedback as relational dialogue, the grade culture problem, revision as core pedagogy, feedback delivery and modality, training and professional development gaps, the student engagement spectrum, and holistic growth orientation. Across all participants, grade culture was identified as a persistent structural barrier to feedback engagement. These findings point to the need for targeted professional development in commenting practices within Tennessee community college writing programs, and support for continued application of text-as-data methodologies in community college composition research.