ID Professional Communicator

How does the artifact support the competency?

Asking for feedback

I sought feedback at two stages of the literature review. Before I started writing, I contacted Dr. Exter for help choosing my topic. Rather than asking an open question, I shortlisted three topics with outlines, explained which one I was leaning toward and why, and asked for advice on narrowing the scope. She replied that all three ideas sounded good and that my preferred option would be the more distinctive choice in the course. She also recommended authors working on character and dispositions in engineering and computing education and shared a Jubilee Centre report that later became one of the main frameworks in my review. Asking at this early stage meant that the scope and sources of my paper were checked by someone who knew the field before I had committed to an argument. The second stage was submitting my first draft to Dr. Lowell for review.

Utilizing feedback

Dr. Lowell’s feedback on my first draft asked me to develop four areas further, namely the comparative synthesis of competing views on how character develops, the implications for online postgraduate programs, the closing recommendation for instructional designers, and the APA formatting of the paper and its references. Although the draft had received a high score, I treated each comment as a specific gap to close rather than an optional suggestion. For the comparative synthesis, Dr. Lowell observed that authors seem to differ on whether reasoning, habit formation, moral imagination, or self-understanding drives character development. I used that observation to structure the revision, putting four corresponding accounts into direct conversation, and added a new source, Bouville (2008), to represent the view that character follows from better ethical reasoning. In the section on online programs, I replaced general statements with concrete design moves, including anchoring virtues to existing course artifacts, tying reflection prompts to milestones, keeping cohorts stable across courses, and adapting assessment for asynchronous delivery. I also added a closing recommendation for program designers on what engineering and technology programs should take away from this research.

In response to her fourth point, I completed a full APA review covering the title page, abstract, headings, hanging indents, italics, and DOIs. Beyond her comments, I verified every citation against its source, which led me to correct five references, and made sure the three open questions raised earlier in the paper were answered explicitly. All revisions are highlighted in the final draft and listed in a revision note at the end of the paper, and most of them trace directly to a specific comment in her feedback.

Providing feedback

The third part of this competency is shown through a discussion on my job aid for M. David Merrill’s Pebble in the Pond model. My classmate, who had been assigned Merrill’s First Principles of Instruction, suggested that the model’s lack of a role for learners could limit their experience. She also asked whether learners should have a say in problems that can be solved in more than one way, using a math problem as an example.

In my reply, I first agreed with the part of her comment that held up, which was the strong influence of the First Principles on Pebble in the Pond. I then offered a different reading of her main point. I explained that the absence of learner input is less a flaw in the model than a boundary Merrill drew around it, since he describes Pebble in the Pond as a design model that still needs front-end analysis, implementation, and evaluation to form a complete development process. I suggested that learner feedback could be gathered by pairing the model with a broader process model such as ADDIE or SAM, and that this feedback could then inform the activation phase. Finally, I pointed out that her math example was actually a good fit for the model, because a problem with several valid solution paths still has an outcome that can be checked. In her reply, my classmate noted that she had not fully grasped that Merrill had defined this boundary, and that she had missed the detail while comparing the other models. The exchange shows feedback that was specific, grounded in the source, balanced between agreement and correction, and that changed a peer’s understanding of the model.

Competency alignment with prior knowledge and experience

As a content marketing professional writing for B2B SaaS and technology brands, I have worked directly with in-house brand teams, so receiving and incorporating feedback is a regular part of my process. However, feedback in marketing usually centers on brand voice, messaging, and business goals, and the writer’s job is to bring the draft in line with what the client needs. The feedback on my literature review worked differently. Dr. Lowell’s comments asked me to think harder and go deeper rather than to match a preference, so responding to them required more reading and more synthesis instead of making stylistic changes. Similarly, Dr. Exter’s recommendations gave me a strong starting point, but since some of the authors she suggested are her own research collaborators, writing close to my advisor’s research area made me aware that I had to use those sources to reach my own conclusions rather than adopt her framing.

Giving feedback is also a familiar part of my work. I have managed five to six direct reports, regularly mentored junior writers, and conducted workshops for novice content marketers in which I set assignments, reviewed them, and shared feedback for improvement. That experience taught me that feedback helps someone learn when it starts with what is working, explains the reasoning behind any change, and leaves the person with a clear way forward, rather than only pointing out what is wrong. I followed the same approach in my reply to my peer, acknowledging the valid part of her comment, explaining why I read the model differently, and suggesting how her concern could be addressed. The main difference was the new setting. In my professional roles, I often give feedback from a position of seniority to people who expect guidance from me. In this discussion, I was offering an alternative perspective to a fellow student, in a shared forum, on a topic we were both still learning. This meant I could not rely on experience or authority, so I grounded my point in Merrill’s own description of the model instead.

Reflection on experiences

I believe these artifacts work well for this competency because together they show a complete feedback cycle rather than a single moment in it. The literature review documents the full sequence of asking for, receiving, and applying feedback, and the highlighted revisions make it possible to see exactly what changed and why. The discussion exchange covers the other direction, and my classmate’s reply shows that my feedback was understood and useful rather than simply posted. This process also showed me that feedback on a draft that is already strong can still lead to substantial improvement. The sections I expanded in response to Dr. Lowell’s comments are now the parts of the paper that most directly support my argument.

There are also limits to this evidence. My example of providing feedback comes from a discussion on my own post, where I was responding to a peer’s comment rather than reviewing her work. In the future, I would like to take part in a structured peer review, such as exchanging drafts with a classmate before a major submission, so that I can bring the review approach I have used with junior writers to a complete piece of academic work, with specific suggestions for improvement. I would also ask peers for feedback earlier in my writing process, not only faculty, since classmates reading as fellow learners are likely to notice different problems. As I move into instructional design work, where designs are reviewed by subject matter experts, stakeholders, and learners, I expect that the ability to ask for, use, and give feedback well will matter as much as any technical skill.

Evidence submitted:

1. Correspondence with Dr. Marisa Exter, my student advisor, during topic selection
2. First draft of the small-scale literature review (EDCI 513) (attached above)
3. Dr. Lowell’s feedback on the first draft
4. Revised final draft with highlighted revisions and revision notes: ‘Integrating Character Education Into Postgraduate Engineering and Engineering Technology Programs’
5. Discussion thread: ‘Merrill’s Pebble in the Pond Model’ (EDCI 513, September 2026)