Responding to Student Writing

Writing assignments can become transformative learning experiences for student writers when substantive feedback leads the student to feel their work is being read and responded to rather than merely assessed and graded. The following best practices will help instructors create substantive feedback experiences for students.

• Give your most substantive feedback on work-in-progress, rather than a final draft. Students will engage more extensively with feedback they receive on a paper they are still working on. Once the assignment is over, they tend to read comments as a justification for a grade rather than as an opportunity to learn.
• Set priorities for the comments you offer, and tell students about those goals. This allows students to focus their attention and learn more from your feedback. A paper covered in comments is overwhelming and demoralizing and leaves the writer with little insight into which issues are major and which are minor. By focusing comments on the areas you are most intent on the student learning about, you can both increase their learning and decrease your workload. For example, you might tell students that your comments for a paper will focus on how original their proposal idea is, how well they are using the proposal genre, and the clarity of their writing. Let students know they can come to your office hours to discuss aspects of a draft that your comments may not have focused on.
• Address both strengths and limits of a paper. Even a weak paper is typically doing some things well, and it helps the writer to know what's working in the paper as well as what areas need improvement.
• Consider and calibrate your comment types. Comments can take varied forms, such as offering corrections, evaluations, directives, advice, closed questions (a statement that is offered as a question), open questions (true questions), and reflections (sharing your experiences as a reader of the document). In most course contexts, students benefit from having to think about your feedback, so advice, open questions, and reflections can be especially helpful. When you primarily offer corrections, the student has less reason to think about your feedback and may lack the information they would need to understand why your version of a sentence is better than theirs.
• Avoid shorthand language and incomplete thoughts, and make comments legible. Labeling a sentence "awkward" doesn't tell the writer enough about what is wrong with the sentence to learn from their mistake.
• Consider offering audio or video comments. It's easy to use Zoom or other software to record a video that features the student's paper and your talking head as you offer your responses to it. This modality helps students hear and see that your critical comments are offered in a constructive spirit, something that may not come across in written comments. You can also offer a higher volume of comments in a 5 minute video than during 5 minutes of writing.