Abstract

When students are provided with detailed and immediate feedback on their performance in an online test, they may get some pedagogical benefits from the exercise. This study examined the effects of elaborative feedback on students’ reading comprehension skills: inference, reading for gist, and detail reading. The study followed a pre-test post-test quasi-experimental design in which a total of 43 students were involved. The students took a paper-based reading comprehension test before the training was given to measure their current performance. The Moodle Cloud learning management system was used to train the participants of the study. The training was given twice a week for two months. Data were analyzed using mean, paired samples t-test, Cohen’s d and NVIVO software. It was found that there was a statistically significant difference for inference questions before and after the intervention of web based feedback (t = −10.85, sig. = 0.000 and Cohen’s d = 1.63). Similarly, the mean difference for detail reading questions was statistically significant before and after the use of online elaborative feedback (t = −7.340, sig. = 0.000 and Cohen’s d = 1.11). The mean difference of the main idea questions was also statistically significant (t = −6.443, sig. = 0.000, and Cohen’s d = 0.98). The findings clearly show that students’ reading comprehension sub-skills improved after the treatment of the online elaborative feedback provided to the students. The effect size test conducted using Cohen’s d also indicated that the improvements students made in all the sub-skills tested were quite substantial. Thus, as online elaborative feedback has a considerable contribution to improving students’ reading comprehension skills, instructors are encouraged to facilitate situations for online elaborative feedback for their students.