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Ryan Flaherty

CompFAQ wiki: Assessment

What are the most effective ways of providing feedback on student writing?

Between the late 1800s and the 1950s, “rating” student writing in a way that was believed to be “objective” or even “scientific” was the mission of most assessment. Grammar, vocabulary and other “error-correction” mechanisms took precedence over less-quantifiable, more-articulated response practices. Connors and Lunsford explain that the former measures, kept alive through the popularity of rubrics, serve as a sort of defense mechanism against subjectivity, “(evolving) from the rising status of scientific method and statistics and from writing teachers’ uncomfortable awareness of exactly how ‘subjective’ their grading of papers was” (Connors and Lunsford, 201).

Too often, the feedback teachers provide adopts the tone of a critic or judge, and is influenced by a teacher’s vision of an “ideal text.” Brannon and Knoblauch acknowledge the lack of authority present in much student writing, but point out that … the teacher-evaluator [attempts to] ‘(fix)’ the writing in ways that appear to approximate the Platonic Discourse, the Ultimate Propriety, that any given student text may have suggested but not achieved (Brannon and Knoblauch, 158).

In addition, Connors and Lunsford suggest that instructors resist putting too much time into their feedback because “…they [have] little time or energy to say [what they want to say] and little faith that what they [have] to say [will] be heard” (Connors and Lunsford, 211). Time constraints, negative beliefs regarding the extent to which comments are utilized by students, and beliefs that students should already have mastered certain aspects of writing, all contribute to a continued resistance against more progressive, thoughtful feedback practices.

Over the last three decades, researchers have begun to examine the intricacies of teacher feedback: how feedback is worded; how the student-teacher relationship affects feedback interactions; how students respond to teacher feedback; and (though not conclusively), how classroom context influences the efficacy of feedback. The significance of alternative, less-authoritative, approaches to feedback has even greater relevance to the basic writing classroom, wherein most students are used to exclusively receiving criticism for their efforts.

The existing compFAQs wikis on feedback illustrate some aspects of “personalizing” our approach to assessment. They suggest practices such as generating extended responses at the end of student writing (as opposed to in the margins), creating a dialogue with students to help them explore their topics in greater depth, and resisting the temptation to assess student papers with an “ideal” text in mind (http://comppile.tamucc.edu/wiki/basicwriting/bestpractices-feedback). We would like to expand upon the existing wikis’ content on feedback placement and individualization, and add to the response/ commentary discussion with information on phrasing feedback and connecting it to the basic writing classroom context.

Works Cited

pp. 157–166.

http://compile.tamucc.edu/wiki/BasicWriting/EfficientandThoroughFeedback. Retrieved 2 Mar 2008.

Individualizing Feedback

What are the most effective means of individualizing feedback?

Like students and like their writing

Elbow believes that something intangible—one’s attitude towards his or her students— influences the way teachers respond to the student writing, and that something equally-intangible—a student’s motivation for writing—hinges on the student-teacher relationship built through response practices. Elbow argues that “[If a student] doesn’t like her writing enough to be pushy and hungry about finding a few people who like it, she probably won’t get better” (Elbow, 200).

Explain your reactions from a reader’s perspective

When teachers respond from the position of an interested reader, it can fuel a student’s desire to improve and gain control over his or her writing. Some of the following statements that Elbow made in response to a student who struggled to maintain his focus on a writing assignment indicate how a teacher’s perspective could affect a student’s attitude towards revision:

I felt something interesting going on here…The trouble is I like your stories/moments. My preference would be not to drop them…Not sure how to do it. Break it up into bits to be scattered here and there?… Good writers often get lots of narrative and descriptive bits into expository writing (Elbow, in Straub, “Response,” 377).

In line with this idea of reflecting a personal investment in the reading of students’ texts is what Summer Smith calls the “reader response” approach to providing feedback. Some of the qualities of this genre include using the personal “I” (the teacher) as the subject of statements, responding to aspects in the student’s writing which reflect something about the student, and describing the effect that the writer’s text had on the reader’s experience (Smith, 257–258).

Wilson offers support for this kind of reading of student texts, explaining that part of the responsibility a teacher has with regard to a student’s writing process is to give the student a “…chance to see what happened in (the teacher’s) mind as (he or she) read (the student’s words)”(Wilson, 63). The emphasis here should be on how the student text impacted an individual reader. Straub supports this subjectivity, claiming that response should be “..ideologically charged with (the teacher’s own) ideas, interests and perspectives…,”(Straub, “Student, Teacher and Classroom, 32).

Use response to foster dialogue

The purpose of sharing one’s own ideas and reactions with the writer is to create opportunities for students to think about specific issues their texts’ are raising, or a “response conversation,” as Straub calls it. Straub sums up a synthesis of the “reader response” position and Elbow’s “liking” philosophy, with the following definition of response conversation: “…the best conversational responses integrate informal dialogue and serious inquiry”(Straub, “Response as Conversation,” 388). Mathison Fife and O’Neill believe that creating dialogue through inquiry and giving students an opportunity to respond to teacher feedback fosters metacognition, which in turn makes students better self-editors (Mathison Fife and O’Neill, 316).

The list below highlights some aspects of addressing students’ individual needs through written response:

• Have students submit short notes indicating what they are trying to accomplish with a given draft, and what questions they have for the reader of this draft (Brannon & Knoblauch, Elbow, Mathison Fife & O’Neill, and Sommers).
• Take an incremental approach to responding: respond to the originality of students’ ideas, then to their struggles with elaborating on ideas, then to the voice with which he or she expresses those ideas, and finally to the organization of his or her expression (Straub, “S,T & C,” 43).
• Do not neglect commenting on mechanical issues for students who struggle with these in early drafts (44).
• Vary the tone of commentary for different students (directive, explicit, complimentary) with respect to their demeanors (45).
• Evaluate the disparity between what the writer has said and what he or she has intended to say, as opposed to what you (as the teacher) think the text should say (Brannon and Knoblauch, 161).

The following questions are ones I generated in reflecting upon my own response practices with students:

• Who is the writer of this text? (What do I know about her background,experience, etc.)
• What are this writer’s strengths as a writer and as a student?
• What are some of this writer’s weaknesses or areas of difficulty?
• How does this writing compare and or relate to other works he or she has produced?
• What can I say that might help him/ her and in what way could it help?
• What parts of this writing do I subjectively like?
• What parts do I subjectively dislike and why?

Works Cited

Of Teacher Response.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 33,No. 2, (May, 1982), pp. 157–166.

http://compile.tamucc.edu/wiki/BasicWriting/EfficientandThoroughFeedback. Retrieved 2 Mar 2008.

Narrowing the Gap between Response Practice and Research.” ‘’College Composition and Communication,’‘ Vol. 53, No. 2, (Dec., 2001), pp. 300–321.

To Student Writing.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 48, (1997), pp. 253–265.

Research in the Teaching of English, Vol. 31, (1997), pp. 91–119.

Of Teacher Response.” Assessing Writing, Vol. 7, (2000), pp. 23–55.

English Journal, Vol. 96, No.4. March 2007, pp.62–66.

Connecting Feedback to Course Content

How can teacher commentary be linked to the classroom context?

A more comprehensive approach to feedback goes beyond textual response and takes into account the relationship between classroom context and teacher commentary (Mathison Fife and O’Neill, Straub, Smith). What matters in assessment should mirror what matters in our courses.

Sommers describes that comments and classwork should “…mutually reinforce each other”(Sommers, qtd in Straub, 34). Some variable contextual factors that influence the feedback dynamic, according to Larson, are class discussions and exercises, students’ attitudes and feelings towards their teacher, and feedback students have received on previous writings (Larson, in Straub and Lunsford, 375).

Take an incremental approach

Straub suggests that teachers structure their courses so that an emphasis is placed on developing, supporting and elaborating upon ideas in the first part of the semester. Formal concerns, like sentence structure and correctness, should be progressively given greater precedence (Straub, “Student, Text, Classroom,” 26). Ferris acknowledges the value in choosing issues that become particularly prevalent in student writing, and responding to students with references to their past work. She encourages her pre-service teachers to adopt a “selective” approach to feedback, guided by the following mantra: “I will focus on the two to four most significant feedback points in this paper, rather than addressing every single problem/ error I see” (Ferris, 169–170).

Make the content of your feedback visible and flexible

The influence of students’ perceptions of their writing instructor is highlighted in a case study by Sperling and Freedman. A ninth grade student who granted complete authority to her teacher’s comments was unable to re-think her writing. Instead, she, and other students who aim to “please” their teachers, are unable to make decisions beyond those recommended by teacher comments, and only correct aspects related to the “…information, skills and values embedded in the learning context” (Sperling and Freedman, 4). This effect illustrates the importance of establishing what Auten calls a “Rhetoric of Commentary,” where teachers demystify the types of comments they use in feedback, and explain their purposes in using these comments (Auten, as paraphrased in Mathison Fife and O’Neill, 310).

Tie comments directly to what is going on in the student text

Brannon, Knoblauch and Wilson suggest that the classroom context is constructed through our response practices. They emphasize the importance of helping students discover their own intentions in writing, as opposed to imposing visions of an “ideal text” or rubric requirements upon students. Wilson calls it “[focusing on what [students] want to accomplish and on what effect [their] writing [has] on [the teacher]”(Wilson, 65). Brannon and Knoblauch propose the following questions: “what did the writer intend to do? What has the writing actually said? And How has the writing done what it is supposed to do?”(Brannon and Knoblauch, 162).

The table below suggests a relationship between comments and the larger classroom context:

Works Cited