Ashwell (2000) compared the effect of correction on form with comments on content to determine if there was an optimal order (which should come first). Here, I focus only on the effect of correction, ignoring whether correction came before or after comments on form. I focus specifically on two of the subconditions. In both, subjects wrote 500 word compositions outside of class, and errors were then corrected, with correctors spending 12 minutes on each paper. The correction was "indirect feedback," that is, "underlining or circling grammatical, lexical, and mechanical errors or … using cursors to indicate omissions" (p. 233). Students had a full week to return their revised papers. The assignment was part of regular classwork.

In both conditions, students were able to correct only about one third of their errors (table 2).

from: Ashwell (2000)

Students clearly paid attention to the corrections. For all conditions of the study, students acted on 75% of the formal corrections, and 88% of the formal changes they made were in response to the corrections.

One of the conditions in Chandler (2003) also appears to be a case of students’ rewriting the same paper after correction. In this study, students were taking advanced ESL classes at a music conservatory in the US, and all "had had quite a bit of training in English grammar" (p. 272). Students had every reason to be careful: Accuracy in writing was a component of their grade in the class. Students had several days to make corrections.

Students wrote about eight pages of text and received four different kinds of feedback. In the "correction" condition ("full correction" in table 3), students were provided with the correct form, in the "underline" condition only the location of errors was indicated, as in the previous two studies. In the "describe" condition, a margin note was written indicating the kind of error made in the line it was made (e.g. "punc"), but the precise location was not given. All abbreviations had previously been explained in class and students received a list of the abbreviations. Finally, in the underline/describe condition, both the kind of error made and its precise location were indicated.

As indicated in table 3, with full correction students were able to correct nearly 90% of their errors. It should be noted, however, that all students had to do was copy the teacher’s correction. The other conditions produce results that are quite similar to what we have seen before.

from: Chandler (2003)

In Gascoigne (2004), first semester university students of French were asked to write four compositions. Each essay was connected to a unit and was designed to help students practice those rules presented in the unit. Students were given two days to make corrections, and had access to the textbook during this time. Correction of grammar errors included information about the location of the error and a description of the error, and sometimes the correct form was provided. Gascoigne only gives two examples: "Pay attention to verb endings" and "Don’t forget agreement."

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