In your First-Year Seminar, it’s important to think about how you want to engage with your students’ writing. Remember, providing feedback doesn’t have to be the same thing as assessing student writing. In fact, many FYS instructors make their courses Cr/U (or highly encourage students to take it as Cr/U) to decrease the focus on assessment. This allows students to practice receiving feedback and integrating feedback as writers.

That being said, responding to student writing is a big part–and often the most difficult and time-consuming part–of teaching a writing-intensive course. This page contains some ideas about how to make our responses both useful for students and manageable for us as instructors.

We might begin by reflecting on why we respond to student work at all. Quite apart from needing to give and justify grades, we offer feedback as part of an ongoing dialogue with students about their ideas and how they are expressed. Moreover, as Nancy Sommers explains in her short article, Responding to Student Writing, our comments “dramatize the presence of a reader” (148) and help students to view their own work from an outside perspective, a vital skill in learning to evaluate and improve their writing.

In FYS courses in particular, moreover, we offer feedback we hope will aid students as they build skills and confidence as writers more generally. Ideally, our responses foster the many facets of intellectual growth students experience in their first semesters, as they become better writers and, in so doing, better readers, discussants, thinkers, and creators.

Bearing all this in mind, then, a few ideas come to the fore to guide us in giving feedback and assessment in the FYS.

(1) Don’t over do it! Writers can only take in so much feedback at a time so be strategic. You might try giving an end note that describes 2-3 areas to focus on in later drafts or future writing projects. Pair this end note with a few specific in-text comments that show students where in their writing, you noticed a disruption in logic or a lack of analysis. So, too, might you focus on sharing your thoughts on one higher-order concern such as content, use of sources, depth of analysis, and organization (HOCs) and one lower-order concern such as syntax, punctuation, and citations (LOCs). If the two are connected, explain how. For example, a clunky sentence might be related to an underdeveloped idea.

(2) Provide feedback that reinforces writing as a process as described here. Consider sharing ideas of how students can integrate your feedback into their thinking for other writing projects. Try phrases like “In future writing projects, you might try to….” And don’t be afraid to be specific. Let them in on your writing process, too, by suggesting they try a technique while brainstorming or think about transitions more as they refine their argument in the drafting stage.

(3) Read like a peer-reviewer rather than a teacher. Try to read your students’ work the same way you read that of your colleagues. Do not look for error or deficit. Instead, try to meet them where they are at in their thinking and writing as you would when working with someone in your field.

(4) Encourage students to think more deeply about the issues. In your comments, try to build a bridge between a student’s current appreciation of the complexity of course material and your own. You can do this by probing, connecting one text or concept to another, contrasting one point with another, and so on. Such comments invite students to join you in an intellectual journey rather than write for your grade.

(5) Ask questions instead of identifying weaknesses. Studies show that students respond better to a question such as “How might this paragraph change if you explain this idea in an additional sentence or two?” than to unclear criticism such as “This is vague” or “Add more analysis.” You can even ask a question about a LOC such as, “did you mean for this verb tense to shift?” By their nature, questions solicit writers to think before making a revision, emphasizing that writing is not mere task-completion.

(6) Invite students to consider their larger purposes and goals in writing the piece. To help students write with conviction and force, ask them questions about the implications and stakes of their ideas and arguments. Who is their audience and how does that shape the order their ideas unfold? If someone were to describe their essay to a friend, what would they say? Prompt your students to ask these questions of themselves to help them make their thoughts clearer and more refined.

(7) Consider the values you are trying to honor and direct your feedback toward them. Actually making a list of these values can be extremely illuminating and helpful in guiding your responses to student writing. These values aren’t exactly the same thing as learning goals, though they may overlap a lot. As Tony Scott and Asao B. Inoue explain, “whatever is emphasized in an assessment produces what is defined as ‘good writing’ in a class, a program, or a curriculum. Likewise, what is not emphasized becomes less important and may not be considered characteristic of good writing” (Naming What We Know 30).

(8) For students whose first dominant language isn’t English that are struggling with language use, gently point out sentence level confusion. Try to focus on identifying patterns rather than correcting a students’ writing. Quite often language learners know the rules, but they haven’t proceduralized them yet. By having them address sentence level confusion on their own, they will get better at noticing such moments. This process takes time so be patient. Moreover, some English grammatical rules, such as articles (a/an/the) and prepositions, don’t translate literally across languages, making them especially hard to get a grasp on.

Methods for providing feedback

One-on-one Meetings

Cancel a class and have your students meet with you instead for 15 minutes to talk about their writing. This can happen before they submit their essays or after. Talking about writing can be much more engaging and can allow you to be more specific, ask questions, and hear what your students want to communicate in their writing.

Audio Comments

Try recording your feedback rather than writing it. Moodle has this option built into its assessment features. Aim for roughly 3 minutes of comments where you (1) take note of what works well (2) address what you think they can work on as a writer and (3) address any content related successes/confusions.

Peer Review

Writers need readers. Quite often, students only experience how one reader engages with their writing – their professor. Incorporating peer review can help students receive much more feedback from a more diverse set of readers. For ideas about peer review check out this doc.

Addressing syntactical confusion

There are times when we read a student’s writing and we simply cannot understand their prose. When you notice syntactical confusion, try to explain what about the sentence structure is confusing. For example, if you see a run-on, don’t merely write “run on” but explain that there are multiple subjects in the sentence which makes it hard for you to know what, precisely, the student is talking about. Try also to notice patterns. You can address verb tense, for example, in one paragraph of the prose by explaining the mistake and your readerly confusion. Then note that this occurs throughout the paper.

Too many mark-ups on a paper is overwhelming and disheartening. Remember: You are not your students copy-editor. Think about why you want to address syntactical confusion and how it relates to your learning objectives and reasons for having students write.

Approaches to Assessment

Rubrics

Rubrics clarify writing goals and makes expectations clear to students. They can also take the over-thinking out of evaluating writing. Instructors can create their own rubrics, of course. But you might also ask your students to create a class rubric that can be used to assess their writing for different assignments. It takes time and debate, but the process makes students really convince each other about what makes writing effective.

Check out some examples:

Contract Grading

Contract Grading is a way to get students involved in the evaluation process. In short, you and your students would work together to create a ‘contract’ to be used to assess their writing for the class or perhaps specific assignments. This allows you and your students to negotiate what matters for specific writing projects. In this way, rather than being graded, students actively participate in how their learning is assessed.

Dr. Jane Danielewicz and Dr. Peter Elbow provide details of contract grading in their article “A Unilateral Grading Contract to Improve Learning and Teaching.”

Dr. Asao Inoue includes examples contract grading in the appendix of his book Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies (see p. 331- 336)

Dr. Peter Elbow’s contract grading document used for first-year composition courses at UMass Amherst.

John Warner’s explanation of the benefits of contract grading in Inside Higher Ed.

P/F options

P/F is a great option for low-stakes writing. It is also a useful way to avoid evaluating writing activities that are highly individualized like journal writing or reflective writing. Make sure, however, that you make it clear what counts as a passing submission (word count? questions addressed?).

Self Assessments

Asking students to evaluate their own writing is a great way to encourage the metacognitive skills that help students transfer writing skills between different writing situations.