The Role of Feedback on Academic Writing, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Efficacy of Hellenic Open University's Students (H.O.U).

The feedback, constitutes an important procedure in every form of education and especially in the Open and Distance Education. One of its basic functions, concerns strategies of writing found by the professors in order to enforce the writing skills of the student and especially for the development of the academic written language in the third grade education. It is about a multiplex procedure which demands creation and ideas transformation in a text with cohesing language proficiency and length. Based on these above, it has been noticed that the academic writing incorporates a great number of procedures and strategies. The right way of using these defines the writing success. Moreover, the feedback encourages the learner and activates the internal motive and their self-efficacy about writing. According to Bandura (1993) in education field, self-efficacy constists determinant factor of predicting performance. To be more specific students with high self-efficacy will interact in a great deal with the learning object and will show satisfying results. Their high self-efficacy is related with the increased performance, enhanced self-confidence and the acquisition of new skills. In the contrary, students with low faith in their self-efficacy is possible to resign from their goals and their interaction with the object. Feeling disappointment and so their effort is likely to characterized as failure. The Feedback Intervention Theory by Kluger & DeNisi (1996) is focused on the results of feedback in student's performance and motivation. According to this theory, they claim that the contribution of feedback in the performance depends on the processes at which it directs attention. Central to their Feedback Intervention Theory (FIT) are three hierarchically organized control levels: meta-task processes, task-motivation processes and task-learning processes. Higher level processes can influence lower lever processes. The aim of this paper is to examine the opinion of postgraduate students of the programme 'Education Sciences' of Faculty of Humanities of the Hellenic Open University (HOU), with regard to the feedback and the way it contributes to the improvement of academic writing and the exploitation of writing strategies (meta-task), the enhancement of intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy (taskmotivation) as far as their written tasks is concerned. The research questions concern the features of the feedback that the Professors-Advisors of the Hellenic Open University offer, the connection among the feedback, the writing of written works and the writing strategies, the way that the feedback affects the intrinsic motivation of the postgraduates and their self-efficacy concerning the writing of their written works. Finally, the association, between the self-efficacy of the postgraduates and the writing strategies is examined. The methodological approach was the quantitive method and the collection tool of data, the questionnaire of 40 closed-ended questions. In order to answer the first research question, descriptive analysis was used. For the second and fourth research questions a non-parametric test spearman-rho was used. For the third research question two linear regression were used. The analysis of the data have shown that H.O.U postgraduate's students express their satisfaction as far as quality elements of feedback received are concerned. They also believe that further improvements are needed in order to enable the motivation in academic writing. Moreover, the positive correlation of middle-class between the feedback of the written tasks and the writing strategies has been noted. Generally, the feedback of Professors- Advisors of the H.O.U is addressed to the meta-task level due to Feedback Intervention Theory and this way contributes to the writing performance. Findings show that students know and use the strategies of writing concern in structure and processing of a text. Also, confirm findings of other researches that in third grade education, students use the same strategies in their writing tasks. Another evidence is that students are shown us neutral about the feedback with the professors-advisors and whether this includes useful strategies. In addition, the two linear regressions have indicated that the first one has been proved to predict the intrinsic motivation of the writing of written works and more specifically, the 24% of the observable fluctuation in the postgraduates' answers. Furthermore, in the second one, the feedback explained the 8% of the fluctuation in relation to the postgraduates' viewpoints for their selfefficacy at the writing of their written works. Finally, a low grade positive correlation has been observed between the self-efficacy of the postgraduates and the writing strategies. This indicates that as long postgraduate students make good use of writing strategies, a feeling of satisfaction and self-efficacy in academic writing is been created. However, the fact that students study and learn in the Open and Distance Education should be normally have positive correlations at a high grade. This evidence is been divided by Bandura's (1993) theory which claims that as the level of autonomy is increased the learners are going to increase more and more the internal motivation, their beliefs about their self-efficacy and their interest about academic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]