PROVIDING STUDENT FEEDBACK ON RESPONSES
Need
Providing students feedback on their writing can be so much simpler with digital affordances. Think about how you typically collect, respond to, and return student work. Perhaps your students submit written papers, and you write comments and return them in the next class. The time lag, especially if it is a once-a-week seminar, eats up valuable term time when students could be working on edits. Or perhaps students deliver digital files to your email or learning management system, with the cumbersome trading of files, file formats, and potential interoperability challenges.
In all of these typical workflows, there is either a time lag or difficulties of downloading, uploading, and file formats. Most importantly, the insights you provide individual students may be beneficial for others as well. By electing to make feedback visible and social to the class, as well as encouraging peer-to-peer review, students get to learn from each other and become a community of learners all working towards better thinking and writing.
Solution
Use Responses for student writing and provide feedback through annotations and summary comments.
Whether a short response, a paper proposal, a rough draft, or a final essay, Responses are a great way for students, instructors, and peer-learners to help each other by providing commentary and feedback during the learning process. In the example below, a student has submitted a paper proposal for their final project. Follow the workflow below to see ways that you can directly and instantly communicate with students on their work, using the same pop-up interface as the annotation of course materials.
Work Flow
- Open a student’s Response, and digitally annotate just like you would on regular texts on Lacuna.
- You can use the comments field at the bottom of the page to write meta-commentary on the text as a whole, as well as open-ended suggestions for improvement.
- You may encourage other students, especially in small groups, to serve as peer-reviewers to also provide commentary on their peers’ work.
Example
Below is a sample student research proposal, which the instructor annotated with suggestions. The instructor’s annotations were followed up with a one-on-one discussion, and some of the annotations were produced by the instructor during their live discussion. The student uploaded a revised research proposal one week later.
This model can also be used for peer-editing so that students can read and provide feedback on each other’s writing.
Created by the Stanford Poetic Media Lab