Simplify feedback on writing
By setting objectives and providing feedback on just your stated objectives

For the writing teacher, setting objectives and providing feedback should go together like bacon and eggs.

Marry feedback to objectives

Many writing teachers mess up by divorcing their feedback on students' writing from their course objectives. When I say teachers mess up, I am thinking primarily that they waste their time and energy doing unnecessary work. They may also hinder student learning in the process.

I've discussed elsewhere how you can avoid wasted effort in the area of writing mechanics by narrowly setting objectives and providing feedback on just those narrow objectives as you undertake writing assessment.

On this page, I want to look specifically at the relationship between setting objectives and providing feedback on students' mastery of the writing process.

Purpose of writing course feedback

For "content" courses, like history, feedback often boils down to a report of how well a student scored on a terminal assessment, for example, a unit or year's end test. In content courses, teachers rarely tell students how to do better on the next test in terms more specific than "study hard."

In skills courses, like writing, you teach by giving feedback. (Lectures and class discussions are only ways of delivering information about writing.)

To develop writers, your feedback on writing must be both diagnostic and prescriptive.

Your feedback must tell students where they are in terms of achieving writing competence and specifically what they need to do on the next assignment to improve their skills and their grades on assessment measures.

As you prepare to teach a course, try to consider setting objectives and providing feedback as a single task. The combined approach in the planning stage will help you do less correcting and grading and more focused faciliating of student learning.

Determine likely poor responses

Since it will take students repeated tries before they learn to write competently in any given genre, you must figure out what instructional designers call the most likely wrong answer.

If you've taught the material before, you may be able to recall concepts student didn't understand on first presentation or procedures they took weeks to master. If this is your first time teaching writing, you have to use your imagination.

Illustration: thesis statement creation activity

For purpose of illustration, let's say you have presented material on how to write a thesis statement by adding an assertion to a topic and you want to test their comprehension through informal writing.

If you ask students to write a thesis statement on a topic from your curriculum, what is/are the most likely "wrong" responses? For that assignment, the most likely "wrong" responses (those that are wrong in terms of helping students write good thesis + support essays) are those that:

• State a fact rather than an opinion.

• Use vague, imprecise terms.

• Are long and rambling instead of concise.

• Are written in passive voice.

Students can mess up a thesis statement in other ways, but these four are the ones that you are most likely to get in response to your informal writing prompt.

Feedback on informal writing

Once you know the most likely wrong responses, you should be able to figure out the feedback to provide and how to provide it.

Showing and discussing some of the student responses (without identifying the authors) is probably an appropriate way of providing feedback on the thesis statements activity. It would allow you to diagnose problems and prescribe or show remedies.

Feedback on formal writing

On formal assignments (those on which students get grades), each student must have some individual feedback that shows his/her progress toward the course objectives and provides feedback that teaches the student what to do differently or better in future assignments.

For the diagnostic part of your feedback, I recommend using rubrics in which you've embedded your course writing objectives. Such writing rubrics allow you to indicate very quickly the objectives a student has met and those still have to be met.

For the prescriptive part you must tell the student what to do differently in the next assignment. Do not write a book. Your prescription needs only:

• A sentence suggesting one change that will have a big pay off over the long term.

• A sentence suggesting one change that will make a difference in the grade on the next paper.

To make the prescription palatable, sandwich negative comments between positive ones.

Other ideas related to feedback are on the writing assessment thread.