Responding to Student Writing
Creating Effective Assignment Criteria
The single best way I know to make grading easier, more coherent, and faster, is to develop, share, and use grading criteria. It may take a little time and experimentation to work out what exactly you want students to be showing in a given paper, but that time is repaid when it comes time to grade.
Why develop explicit assignment criteria?
- Criteria help demystify what for many students is a very mysterious process.
- Criteria allow students to write in a more focused and effective way.
- Criteria enable instructors to read and respond to papers more quickly, consistently, and effectively.
- Criteria promote consistency of grading across sections taught by different instructors--whether TAs or faculty.
What makes for good criteria?
- Alignment of assignment goals with course goals.
- Clarity.
- Concision. Too much criteria, or lengthy explanations of even a few, may render criteria ineffective. (Try to limit yourself to 3-6 criteria and make sure you can explain them in less than a page.)
How can criteria streamline grading?
- Use your criteria to guide the design of your writing assignment.
- Share the criteria with students before they write. If you can, give them model papers to show what successfully meeting your criteria looks like.
- Limit commenting. You will save time and be more effective by focusing comments only on those criteria most important to a particular task.
Commenting--What can one say on papers, and how can it be said efficiently and effectively?
- Key your comments to the grading criteria. Commenting keyed to your criteria (see above) will help you save time and communicate more clearly with students.
- Resist marking papers for grammatical errors. As counterintuitive as it might seem, marking grammar errors actually doesn't help most students and can in fact be at cross-purposes with your assignment goals. How? It can keep you from commenting on higher order skills, and it can distract students from content and higher order writing skills. Most students are familiar with sentence-level error, but the more challenging students find an assignment to be, the more surface-level mistakes shows up in their drafts.
- More comments are not always better. In fact, it can turn out to be much worse! Studies have shown that except under special conditions students do not--maybe even cannot-process more than a limited number of comments. (One way to expand students' processing of comments is to build a rewrite step into your assignment or to ask students to write a short revision plan in response to your comments.)
- Point out specifically where and how students have been successful. This is at least as effective in improving student writing as pointing out where they are having difficulties.
- You don't have to comment on all writing assignments. You don't have time nor is it effective to comment on--or even read--all the writing you ask students to produce over the quarter. Be sure to explain, however, what you will read and make sure you have some way to validate all your students' work (for example, by collecting all assignments in a portfolio submitted at the end of the quarter).
Ways to Comment on Student Writing
There are many more ways to "validate" student writing than the traditional "read-them-all-and-comment-and-grade" strategy. Below are some different ways you can comment on students papers to help them carry out the revisions necessary for future writing assignments.
- Recognition. Here the reader simply recognizes the writing, accepts it as complete, but doesn't judge, edit, or comment in any way that suggests that the work should be different or better. Though potentially appropriate for any sort of writing, it is truly the only fair response for experiment drafts such as journals, free-writes, or in-class engagement work.
- Description. A non-judgmental response which aims solely at describing one's on-going response to the paper's logical, argumentative, or descriptive sequence. This is appropriate, and very helpful, for any first or subsequent draft.
- Conversation. A response that moves a step beyond description to raise issues, ask questions, seek clarification, or imagine options. This is a more challenging sort of commenting since, working from the assumption that students have produced something of value in the draft at hand, it involves imagining possible extensions and re-workings of what the students has produced so far.
- Evaluation. This category includes elements of both description and grading (see below). My evaluation is criteria-based: I tell students where I think their paper stands with respect to certain criteria. Fair and effective evaluation depends upon students' understanding the criteria you will use; evaluation is inappropriate whenever students have not first been given the chance to understand those criteria as well as to see how they apply to the assignment.
- Grading. Only used when the writing has gone through its entire composing--and potentially revision--process.
Modes of response I try to avoid include advising/prescribing and correcting/editing. Advising differs from description and conversation by slipping into prescription, and as such compromises my goal of making students responsible for the choices and changes they make in drafts. Correcting and editing for misspelled words, comma splices, or other similar errors in student writing similarly limits students' ability to edit on their own. Corrections also take emphasis away from the higher order skills to be demonstrated in the draft.