Best Practices for Providing Useful Feedback to Students
Reading Student Writing
It’s important to respond to student writing in a way that motivates students to engage with the revision process. Providing feedback that elicits students to become better writers, rather than focusing the text of your response on penalizing the type of writing that you don’t want, is the overall goal of giving effective feedback to students. To respond effectively, however, it’s imperative to consider how faculty read and engage with student writing. An effective response begins in a thoughtful reading of a student text. Consider the following tips for a productive read-through:
- Read it outloud. You might get a better sense of what the student is trying to say.
- Pay attention to what the student is doing well. Resist the urge to think about “the long road ahead.” Make note of what the student can do as you read.
- Try reading the piece in it’s entirety before beginning to grade or comment. This will allow you time to prioritize what the student should work on first.
- Read compassionately. Since written communication is an interaction between the writer and the reader to make meaning, take responsibility for being an empathetic reader who works to understand the student writer. Give students the benefit of being a best-case situation reader.
Providing Useful Comments to Student Writers: Tips + Suggestions
Written feedback is one method to provide students with assistance for improving their academic writing. This type of feedback not only helps to clarify the evaluation of their writing, but provides a focus area for the student to work on in the coming assignments. However, providing effective feedback that inspires student motivation can be a challenge. The following methods can help you write more effective feedback.
- Prioritize the feedback. Prioritize the aspects of their writing that need the most attention in order for a student to demonstrate their learning in your course. Aim to focus on concepts of writing that can be applied to future contexts (not simply retroactively).
- Limit yourself to one or two comments per page. Resist the urge to respond to everything. If possible, address 1-2 major concerns present throughout the paper. This is a pattern that the student can address in their next assignment.
- Avoid shorthand markings. Shorthand only works if the writer already knows how the grammar should work. They often only add another layer of intimidation and/or confusion that only further distances the student from understanding and applying the feedback.
- Create several canned responses for a comment bank. Craft responses that provide detailed explanations of common student challenges (i.e. organization, thesis statement, transitions). These best explanations ensure that students get consistently helpful explanations each semester.
- Provide resources for working on areas of concern. In your comments, provide a link or two to helpful resources that explain the concept you want them to work on. For example, link a student who struggles with developing effective transition sentences to a website that explains how to do this and provides examples. Basic resources are easy to find with a quick internet search.
- Review your comments before sharing them with students. As a writer yourself, would you find this feedback productive and useful? Is it clear what are the writer should do next? Do they support student learning and prompt revision? If not, take the time to revise. Technology can be a helpful mode for providing feedback because it allows you to revise for clarity.
Helping Students Make Use of Comments
A final, yet often overlooked, aspect of responding to student writing is ensuring that students understand and apply the feedback you’ve provided. Here are a few suggestions that you may find help students to do this:
- Be available to meet. This can be done in-person during a conference, via email or video chat. Be prepared to answer students’ questions about the feedback and provide clarification, examples, and resources. You are students’ first resource on comments and improvements for their writing.
- Get students to speak back to the comments. For example, assign a brief bit of informal reflection writing asking students to apply your feedback to the next writing assignment. Additionally, you can ask students to write 1-2 thoughtful questions they have about their feedback that you can discuss informally in small groups.
- Create a Canvas Discussion Board for understanding feedback. They can use this space to post confusing comments or questions and get feedback from both peers and yourself.
Addressing Grammatical Error in Multilingual Writing
As faculty work to help multilingual students develop as academic writers, issues regarding instruction of grammar often arise. How do we best support students’ growing understanding of grammatical convention within the university setting?
During their university experience, students grow a repertoire of language structure. While this is happening, students will make errors. However, these errors are signs of learning. As second language acquisition expert, Dr. Vivian Zamel writes, “errors are inevitable in the process of acquiring an additional language (both English and the academic language of the course).” As a result, it’s imperative to limit the number and type of errors that you address in your feedback. Zamel suggests, “rather than trying to address or correct all errors, which is likely to overwhelm both you and the students, read through a student’s text and try to locate prominent or recurring patterns of error and help students understand those.” Learn more about Zamel’s recommendations here.
To be an inclusive teacher, it’s important to treat grammar as a pedagogical component of one’s writing instruction. An understanding of grammatical convention does not ensure thoughtful writing just as the absence of some grammatical convention does not undermine critical thinking present in the work. Generally speaking, penalizing student writing (like a point deduction) for grammatical error does not teach a student how to correct their error.
Instead, review a text like Pedagogical Grammar by Casey Keck and YouJin Kim can help faculty learn how to teach grammatical convention effectively. Additionally, for more helpful ideas addressing error in multilingual student writing, download Dr. Vivian Zamel’s handout here. This useful document is handy to have on hand when responding to error in multilingual student writing.
Boise State Writing Center
The Boise State Writing Center is a great resource for all students who are learning to write in academic contexts. At the Writing Center, writing consultants will help your students understand assignments and work towards meeting instructor expectations, without taking over the students’ writing. They will engage students in a conversation about their writing and learning and work to address some of the challenges that the student has with writing in a 30-60 minute consultation. Additionally, the consultants will help students identify patterns of error and learn to fix those mistakes, when it distracts from the overall meaning.
It’s important to manage our expectations about what peer consultants can do within a given consultation. The Writing Center does not work to make a multilingual student’s writing sound like a native speaker nor do they ensure error-free writing. That being said, the Writing Center offers meaningful support for students as they develop as academic writers. Learn more about how the Writing Center can help your classes here.