Category: Formative and Summative Feedback

Research-Based Proposal (Group Task) [Excerpt]

Your collaboratively written proposal should be addressed to an audience that could act on your proposal. As a result, you will need to tailor your content (claims and evidence), your organization, and your form to this audience. Furthermore, your proposal should:

• Identify the problem that you are addressing and convince your audience that the problem is a significant one that deserves attention;
• Explore all of the alternatives for solving the problem and acknowledge previous efforts to address the problem that you are investigating (integrating your group’s research); and
• Select the most feasible solution and offer evidence to support that choice (using both your library and field research).

Your proposal should have a carefully constructed argument and should employ other rhetorical strategies, such as rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, and logos) and visual design.

Format and Length

Your rhetorical strategies, including your format (the type of document and its design), will depend on the purpose of your proposal, your audience or intended readers, and how you want to disseminate your proposal to members of your audience. You might use colors, manipulate white space and margins, include data charts and graphs, and/or use photos. The possibilities are endless; however, please remember that the design must meet the needs of a real situation to which you want to respond, and the language in your proposal is as important as, if not more important than, the design.

Length also will vary greatly depending on what your project is.  Keep in mind that your project needs to be long enough to convince your audience of your proposal—which means it needs to provide sufficient evidence to support your claim, as well as links explaining the connections between your evidence and your claim. You also need to acknowledge and respond to differing views.

Research-Based Proposal

Research-Based Proposal

Research-Based Proposal

Research-Based Proposal

Prioritizing Feedback

How much is enough/too much? Is it better to prioritize feedback or to try to address every issue (including lower order concerns)?

• Nancy Sommers cautions teachers to keep the goal of the assignment in mind when responding to student writing. She notes, “teachers’ comments can take students’ attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers’ purposes in commenting” (“Responding” 149). Sommers suggests striving for continual reinforcement between comments on students’ writing and classroom instruction and activities.

• In Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment, Barbara E. Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson emphasize that feedback has contextually-dependent roles (2). Feedback can:
  • Evaluate the quality of writing,
  • Communicate students’ strengths (and weaknesses) as writers,
  • Motivate future writing and revision, and
  • Provide organizational cues in the learning processes over a semester.

• As these multiple roles suggest, instructors should consider whether students benefit most from formative feedback or summative feedback, given the stage in the writing process and the overarching timeline of the semester.

• Emphasis on these multiple roles can be adapted to the rhetorical situation. For instance, feedback given early in the semester might focus on motivating students’ future writing and suggesting goals for the next writing task. At the end of the semester, feedback instead might prioritize communicating students’ strengths and evaluating the quality of their writing against community-accepted criteria (such as course objectives).

• In “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers,” Nancy Sommers notes that students focus revision activities on lexical changes. If teachers want students to extend the development of their ideas or to rethink their underlying ideas, feedback needs to emphasize those types of changes and set students up to plan appropriate revision strategies.

• Multiple studies reaffirm the importance of addressing surface-level errors within the context of students’ authentic writing, but research also cautions that students are more likely to apply comments about lower order concerns to their future writing if teachers engage in “minimal marking.” In other words, identifying a few (two or three) categories of errors (i.e., articles, commas after introductory clauses, comma splices, etc.) in each project and prioritizing those that interfere with meaning will have more impact on future writing than identifying all errors in the project.
  (See Haswell for one example of a minimal marking strategy.)

Situating Feedback and Engaging Students

What strategies can I employ to focus on the rhetorical effectiveness of students’ writing, moving beyond identifying writing strategies as right/wrong or focusing on justifying the grade?

What feedback strategies are most effective at engaging students? What will increase the likelihood of students’ active response to feedback? How can I craft feedback so that students will transfer my response to their future writing situations?

• Responses to student writing can connect assignments back to overarching course objectives. Teachers can:
  • Ask students to identify connections between evaluation criteria for individual assignments and course objectives. (Of course, this option assumes intentionality in the design of the course and assignments to support achievement of the objectives.)
  • Incorporate the language of course objectives in their responses to student writing.
  • Encourage students to reflect on their progress towards the course objectives and to write short responses to teacher-feedback. ENG 110 students could reflect on the strengths of their writing processes and/or comment on their ability to analyze and respond to a rhetorical situation (as characterized by the teacher-feedback). Students also could identify personal goals for working towards these objectives.

• Responses should communicate priorities for student learning in relation to course objectives. In other words, connecting to course objectives enables faculty to send a consistent message about what they (and the program) value.

• Walvoord and Anderson suggest:
  • Explaining what grades represent, using explicit evaluation criteria and placing the grade in the context of the course (and course objectives) (109-110).
  • Addressing feedback to the writer, not to the writer’s errors. Speaking to the writer encourages teachers to identify student achievements and to help students establish goals for future writing (110).
  • Saving comments for teachable moments, when students can act on the feedback to revise their writing (111-112). Offer feedback on work-in-progress, or if students have submitted a final version of a paper, connect feedback to course objectives so that students can apply the feedback to the next class assignment.
  • Communicating priorities, emphasizing global revisions over line-item edits if the revision might eliminate the applicability of the edits (115).

• Edwina L. Helton and Jeff Sommers promote an approach to grading that identifies student writing as “Early,” “Middle,” or “Late” in its development. Intrigued? Join us for the College Writing Reading Group, next week.

• In The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing, Cheryl Glenn, Melissa A. Goldthwaite, and Robert Connors note that teachers can situate feedback by working with students to develop class-based evaluation criteria. In other words, students take an active role in connecting expectations for their writing to the course objectives and the goals for the specific assignment. Faculty, in turn, focus their response on these community-based criteria. Glen, Goldthwaite, and Connors also note that rubrics can help instructors apply these criteria consistently and aid communication about the reader’s response in relation to the established criteria.

Rubrics as a Tool for Consistency and Efficiency

How can I use rubrics more effectively without becoming rigidly prescriptive?

How can I offer feedback more efficiently?

• Examples of rubrics: How do the different rubrics shape our responses?

Active Learners: Strategies for Promoting Revision and Transfer

• Prioritize comments to help students learn to prioritize their revisions.

• Anchor comments – to specific portions of the students’ texts, to evaluation criteria, and/or to course objectives. This rhetorical strategy contextualizes comments, helping students interpret the them and prioritize revision/future application.

• After providing formative feedback, require students to write detailed, specific revision plans. Revision plans can take several forms, including letters to teachers, commitments to students’ readers, or personal reflections.

• When returning summative feedback, require students to establish goals for their future writing based on the feedback they received and the course objectives. You can contextualize this activity further by scheduling it after the introduction of the next assignment; then students can tailor their goals to a specific future task – not the abstract idea of all future writing (which could reflect multiple genres, audiences, and purposes). This timing also introduces reflection on past communicative acts as a planning activity in the writing process.

Works Cited

Glenn, Cheryl,  Melissa A. Goldthwaite, and Robert Connors, eds. The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

Haswell, Richard H. “Minimal Marking.” College English 45.6 (1983): 600-604.

Helton, Edwina L., and Jeff Sommers. “Repositioning Revision: A Rhetorical Approach to Grading.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 28.2 (2000): 157-164.

Sommers, Nancy. “Responding to Student Writing.” College Composition and Communication 33.2 (1982): 148-156.

Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” College Composition and Communication 31.4 (1980): 378-388.

Walvoord, Barbara E., and Virginia J. Anderson. Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.

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?

Reasons for Using Portfolio Assessment

1. Assesses writing after semester-long development
2. Encourages student-management of revising and editing processes
3. Supports student reflection on writing processes

Strategies for Implementing Portfolio Assessment

1. Models
   • Semester-long portfolio: Select x out of y projects for grading
   • Extended project portfolio: Combine related projects as one unit/project
2. Early introduction of requirements (handout from A Work in Progress)
3. Draft due dates and integrated peer review
   • Specific to certain assignments
   • Open for student selection
4. One-on-One or Small Group Conferences
5. Clearly articulated evaluation criteria; rubrics
6. Texts that support portfolio assessment

Pros/Cons of Portfolio Assessment

Pros

• Delays assessment until instructor has provided more direct instruction in writing
• Encourages self-reflection and self-assessment by students
• Supports reflection on the writing process (facilitating course objectives)
• Facilitates student management of a larger writing project

Cons

• Articulating mid-semester grade can be challenging
• Grading can be time-intensive at the end of the semester