Providing Feedback on Student Writing
Why Respond to Student Writing
Providing specific, actionable, and timely feedback to students (rather than just a grade) is one means of practicing inclusive writing pedagogy—though it also presents its challenges. Your feedback is where students can perceive you engaging with their ideas and acknowledging their labor; it’s also where students feel most vulnerable and where you might feel pressed for time and/or frustrated at students’ missteps.
It can help to remember the purpose of commenting on student writing: to coach revision and growth—if not of the present piece, then in future work for your course or program. Your responses can help you connect your evaluation of writing to individual students’ goals, needs, and strengths, something that has the potential to increase transparency and bolster students’ self-efficacy.
Frameworks for Approaching Feedback
Coaching Growth
When we comment on substantial research and writing assignments, we should play the role of a coach providing guidance for revision, because it is through revising that our students learn most deeply what they want to say and what their readers need for ease of comprehension. Revising doesn’t mean editing: it means “re-visioning”—rethinking, reconceptualizing, or “seeing again.” It is through the hard work of revising that students learn how experienced writers in a given field really compose.[1]
Your comments will be most apt to stimulate revision if you make them on drafts, preferably at least one or two weeks before the final due date. Alternatively, you might allow students to rewrite papers after the final due date. (By allowing rewrites, you can still target your feedback toward significant revision.) Yet another option is to scaffold assignments in such a way that your feedback authentically looks forward and guides students’ development throughout the sequence of assignments.
Promoting revision in your comments (as opposed to pointing out errors or justifying a grade) can change your whole orientation toward reading student writing. You begin looking for the promise of a draft rather than its mistakes. You begin seeing yourself as responding to rather than correcting a set of papers. You think of limiting your comments to two or three things that the writer should work on for the next draft rather than commenting copiously on everything. You think of reading for ideas rather than errors. In short, you think of coaching rather than judging.
Recognizing Global & Local Writing Concerns
Research shows that students are often confused by what instructors want them to concentrate on in their writing and in their revisions. They may think, for example, that correcting semicolon mistakes is as important as anticipating and addressing counter-arguments or clarifying or strengthening the main point of their paper. And our comments on their writing too often lead students to make only superficial revisions to words and sentences, overlooking larger conceptual, rhetorical, and structural revisions that would most improve a paper. So as we design writing assignments, talk with students about their writing, and develop rubrics and evaluation criteria, we need to find ways to communicate clearly with students about different levels of revision and about priorities for writing and revising.
We can help signal priorities if we clearly differentiate between global and local writing concerns. In our assignments, comments, conferences, and evaluation criteria, we can help students by focusing first on conceptual- and structural-level planning and revisions before grammatical-and lexical-level revisions. We don’t mean to suggest that we should ignore grammar in students’ writing. Rather, we suggest that instructors offer students guidance on how to strengthen their ideas, their analyses, and their arguments first, and then turn attention to improving sentences, words, and punctuation.
| Global Writing Concerns | Local Writing Concerns |
| Does the draft respond to the central task and rhetorical situation of the assignment? | Are there effective transitions between sections? |
| Does the writer demonstrate thorough understanding of the readings/data/labs they are writing about? | Does the style match the rhetorical situation? |
| Is the draft effectively organized? Does it follow a logical sequence of ideas? | Do sentences or word usage interfere with the writer communicating clearly with the reader? |
| Is each claim or idea adequately developed, explained, and/or supported by evidence? | Are there citation or formatting errors? |
| Is the evidence analyzed or examined thoroughly? | Are there grammar or punctuation errors? |
Peer Review
Through a national study on teacher and peer response in the United States (with over 1,000 responses collected across 70 institutions), WAC scholars have found that if students were given a thoughtfully designed script or outline for peer review, they often provided feedback to peers that was of similar quality to instructor feedback.[2] Perhaps the most important benefit of peer review is its support of student metacognition: giving feedback to peers helps students improve their own writing. Simultaneously, carefully designed peer review activities can alleviate some of the burden of time you may feel when responding to each student’s writing individually!
See the section dedicated to Peer Review for more ideas and guidance for planning peer review in your courses.
