GRADING STUDENT PAPERS

You want your students to write drafts… but it takes time.

How can you make evaluating drafts more efficient for you & more effective for them?

Timing

  • Give students feedback on rough drafts (when they’ll read it) rather than final drafts (when they might not). You may ask them to tell you, in their final draft, how they responded to your feedback.
  • Benefits: students will be more likely to apply your advice if you give them a chance to do it right away.

“Feedback Pyramid” approach

  • A modest number of in-text edits related to grammar, punctuation, and formatting, followed by a concluding paragraph that includes specific praise, identification of the 2-3 biggest challenges in this paper, and instructions for how the student can improve next time.
  • Benefits: organized, concise, and clear—just like a good student paper! It’s more effective for them, and more efficient for you.

Interactive Cover Sheets

  • Students write a letter to you, attached to their paper, identifying what they’re proud of, what they know they need to work on, what they would have done with 2 more days to revise, what questions they have for you, and what they’d most like feedback on
  • Benefits: students learn to identify their own strengths and weaknesses, and they take more ownership over the process.

Narrative Rubrics

  • Rather than circling numbers, circle descriptions of student work at each degree of proficiency. You might have “mastery” at a 7, while you expect first-years to earn an A for a 3. But, they have a description of that the “next steps” in their growth as writers look like.
  • Benefits: avoid redundant comments, create consistency across disciplines, set expectations in advance, support shared vocabulary.

Feedback Preferences

  • Ask students what feedback is most helpful for them: written or verbal, global or local, outline or detailed, content- or style-based, in person or recorded
  • Benefits: students get feedback that fits the way they learn, and may take less time from you.

Peer Review

  • Ask students to give each other feedback throughout the writing process.
  • Strategies: in-class workshop with worksheets, out-of-class paper exchange, speed dating peer review, Googledocs, whole-class Q&A
  • Benefits: Students learn to give, and receive, feedback from their peers—they may learn as much from reading a peer’s paper as they do from the feedback they receive.

Writing Center

  • Encourage students to visit the Writing Center, or schedule a “strike force” visit to your class
  • Monday-Thursday 3-5, Sunday-Thursday 7-10, MLC 3rd floor
  • Benefits: students get feedback from peers who are also strong writers.

Track Changes

  • Give electronic feedback with “track changes” in Microsoft Word
  • Benefits: clearer for students, if you can type faster than you can write, it saves time, and it helps separate edits/revisions

Other tips:

  • Think as your feedback as creating scaffolding for future growth, not fixing problems
  • Prioritize errors for students, so they know which problems are more serious
  • Balance positive and negative feedback; be precise with both
  • Benefits: students learn from both and feel more validated
  • Don’t undercut praise with “comma, but” criticism
  • Less is More
  • Grade the strongest papers first
  • Ask students to mark thesis, create an outline, write a cover letter, workshop, or turn in drafts to get more “good” papers to start with!
  • Set a timer, and stick to it
  • On some papers, give fewer remarks to individual students and more detailed feedback to the class as a whole
  • Benefits: students see they’re not the only ones who struggle, you write it once rather than 25 times
  • Follow your own advice: be organized, concise, and clear
  • Use shorthand markings for common errors, and distribute a Revision Symbols key
  • Approach feedback as a conversation, not assessment
  • Ask questions rather than giving answers
  • Benefits: it takes less time for you, and the students learn more

CAC Draxler 2013