Responding to Student Writing: Supporting an Instructional Goal


Sep 12 2007

Responding to Student Writing: Supporting an Instructional Goal

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Although this workshop primarily responds to faculty requests for more strategies for responding to student writing, effective feedback also can support our efforts to connect our teaching and assignments to the English 110 Objectives throughout the term. For instance, we can use the language of the objectives in our responses, encouraging students to try additional revising strategies or to complete additional invention activities to better understand the relationship between their audience and their purpose.

Alternatively, we can use the objectives to prioritize our comments, as suggested below:

  • If we designed an assignment to help students understand the capacity of writing to change the world, our response might prioritize content revisions that provide evidence for an argument over edits that do not change the reader’s ability to interpret the writer’s intentions.
  • If a student attempted to employ genre conventions to connect with specific audience members, our comments might focus on the use of those conventions (formatting, methods for acknowledging sources, types of evidence valued in the genre, etc.) over other features of the student’s writing.
  • If we want writers to revise for higher order concerns connected to audience and purpose (use of evidence, organization, development, etc.), our comments might not include editing suggestions that could become irrelevant after substantial revision.

College Writing/English 110 Faculty Practices

  • College Writing/English 110 faculty present evaluation criteria to students in a variety of ways. Most use rubrics, but some also/instead list criteria on their assignment sheets and introduce them during or following peer response. Some faculty list criteria in weighted order.
  • Faculty typically provide feedback in multiple ways. The majority of College Writing faculty use a combination of comments in the margins, terminal/end comments, and a rubric. Some faculty craft a response letter or memo to the writer or give oral feedback during conferences. A few faculty also integrate technology, using comment bubbles in MS Word to anchor their comments to the writers’ texts.
  • Frequently asked questions about feedback include:
    • How much is enough/too much? Is it better to prioritize feedback or to try to address every issue (including lower order concerns)?
    • What strategies can I employ to focus on the rhetorical effectiveness of students’ writing, in order to move beyond identifying writing strategies as right/wrong or focusing on justifying the grade?
    • How can I offer feedback more efficiently?
    • What feedback strategies are most effective at engaging students? What will increase the likelihood of students’ active response to feedback?
    • How can I use rubrics more effectively without becoming rigidly prescriptive?
    • How can I craft feedback so that students will transfer my response to their future writing situations?

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