ask a peer to proofread
This evidence decision is attached to the maintained Brali entry above. The public protocol may be narrowed, reviewed, or kept practical according to the decision.
Evidence Ledger · Protocol candidate · reviewed 2026-08-21
How effective is feedback for L1, L2, and FL learners’ writing? A meta-analysis
The reviewed source can support a conservative practical protocol.
Brali decision: Protocol candidate. This page summarizes a reviewed evidence boundary; it does not reproduce the source and it does not turn one paper into a universal prescription.
What the source supports
In the reviewed secondary-school and university writing literature, feedback effects differed by the level of writing outcome: surface-level feedback improved surface-level outcomes, deep-level feedback improved deep-level outcomes, and combined surface-and-deep feedback could improve both. This supports matching a feedback request to the revision outcome rather than treating all feedback as interchangeable.
What it does not establish
- More feedback is always better for writing.
- Deep feedback should always precede surface feedback.
- Peer, instructor, algorithm-based, or self-feedback is universally the best source.
- The meta-analytic effects generalize unchanged to professional, technical, marketing, fiction, or other creative writing outside the reviewed educational contexts.
- A specific number of feedback rounds, timing interval, or review duration is optimal.
- Receiving feedback guarantees improvement for an individual writer.
Important limitations
- The evidence concerns educational writing by secondary-school and university or college learners rather than all writing contexts.
- Effects varied across L1, L2, and foreign-language learners, so a single population-wide estimate can conceal important differences.
- The included papers used experimental or quasi-experimental designs but varied in feedback treatment, source, duration, outcome measurement, and instructional context.
- Only about one-third of the treatment/control comparisons examined maintenance effects, limiting conclusions about durability.
- Many studies did not report enough learner-level variables, and evidence was comparatively scarce for some learner groups and treatment-outcome combinations.
- Meta-analytic categories for surface, deep, combined, and feedback source are useful abstractions but do not establish one universally optimal revision workflow.
Source context
How effective is feedback for L1, L2, and FL learners’ writing? A meta-analysis
- Source type: meta-analysis
- Design: Meta-analysis of 95 papers meeting experimental or quasi-experimental inclusion criteria, comprising 200 treatment/control comparisons and 253 effect sizes for surface- and deep-level writing outcomes.
- Population: Secondary-school and university or college students represented in L1, L2, and foreign-language writing studies across the included literature.
- Exposure / intervention: Writing feedback targeting surface-level features, deep-level features, or both, delivered through sources including instructors, peers, algorithm-based systems, and self-feedback depending on the included comparison.
- Outcomes: Surface-level writing outcomes such as grammar and spelling; Deep-level writing outcomes such as writing quality, ideation, organization, genre elements, composition length, and vocabulary
Citation: Scherer S, Graham S, Busse V. Learning and Instruction. 2024;93:101961.
DOI: 10.1016/j.learninstruc.2024.101961
What this changes in Brali
Editorial note: Replace the inherited generic peer-proofreading page with a conservative educational-writing workflow: name the current revision level, request feedback at that level, revise against that target, and use a separate pass when another level also matters. Keep the evidence boundary visible and do not convert subgroup findings into a universal ranking of feedback agents.
Use the boundary, not just the headline
When an AI agent or a person retrieves this decision, preserve both the supported claim and the unsupported or overstated claims. Dropping the boundary would turn a reviewed source into a stronger claim than Brali actually maintains.
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