SOME
IDEAS FOR EVALUATING STUDENT WRITING
(without
going crazy!)
Our workshop
on "How to Evaluate Student Writing Without Going Crazy!", gave participants
an opportunity to practice "marking up" a sample paper and comparing our
responses. The subsequent discussion generated many tips for giving students
written feedback:
Always begin
your comments by saying something positive about the writing. Writers need
to know what parts are effective (clear, original, well-worded, etc.) as
well as what needs work.
Marking every
error or covering a student's paper with comments will not only drive you
crazy -- it may also overwhelm your student. Research has shown that many
student writers ignore or react negatively to a large amount of written
feedback -- even if many comments are positive!
Correcting students'
errors or rewriting parts of their papers makes a lot of work for you,
and does not necessarily help them. A better technique -- easier for you
and more thought-provoking for the writer -- is indicating an error with
a squiggly underline or putting a check in the margin next to the line
in which the error occurs.
Criteria for
evaluating essays may differ depending on whether or not the student has
a chance to revise the writing. Some instructors expect less grammatical
and mechanical accuracy on in-class essays.
It's reasonable
to require even short-answer in-class essays to be written in complete
sentences rather than just lists of words or phrases; the act of putting
ideas into sentences requires a higher level of thinking.
[summarized
by Beth Kupper-Herr]