STRONG AND WEAK STUDENTS PREFERENCES FOR ERROR FEEDBACK OPTIONS AND RESPONSES

This study investigated whether level of achievement and difficulty of task influenced 21 low- (LA) and high-achievement (HA) college students' preferences for feedback options when doing computerized grammar exercises. The feedback options were (a) ''right'' or ''wrong'' message (RW), (b) error location (SE), (c) grammatical description of correct response (F), and (c) correct answer (A). An analysis of variance of tallied choices showed that achievement and difficulty of task had no significant impact. All subjects preferred the RW option over SE, F, and A. An analysis of conditional probability of feedback choices revealed that the HA students chose the RW option more often as a follow-up selection to RW, SE, F, and A than the LA students. The study argues that deficiencies in the LA learners' language skills may contribute to lowering their engagement in cognitive and motivational processing.