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Evaluating Student Writing
By David Fleming
The purpose of the first- and junior-year writing courses at UMass Amherst is to help students here grow as readers, writers, and thinkers: to acquire new discourse practices, increase their control over the English language, and develop the habits and dispositions needed for the complex literacies of their future lives. To facilitate such growth, students need time; they need the chance to work in linguistically rich environments, with authentic tasks and supportive partners; they need an atmosphere of respect for the diversity of individuals, cultures, and situations; and they need permission to take risks: to stretch their rhetorical muscles, struggle with difficult problems, even make mistakes.
Grading is often an obstacle to such things: it can cut short the learning process, make the motivation for student effort extrinsic rather than intrinsic, frustrate students who just need more practice in meeting the demands facing them, convince others that they no longer need to work very hard on their writing, and perpetuate pernicious social hierarchies. But grading is also an inescapable – and potentially useful – part of teaching: most importantly, it can help us establish targets for student work and give us powerful tools for communicating with stakeholders about how class members are doing in meeting those targets. The trick is to take advantage of the ways in which grading reinforces the goals of the course and avoid its liabilities.
The first principle is to do everything you can to encourage practice in your class. Students should write constantly, from the beginning of the semester to the end, both in class and out, in a variety of genres, about a variety of topics, for a multitude of audiences. And they should be encouraged to continually re-see, re-think, and revise their writing. This doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be high expectations for quality – far from it. But it does mean that we should keep our eyes on the prize: student growth. Everything else is secondary.
Consequently, sometimes our role as evaluators should be relatively hands-off. If we create an environment in which authentic writing is invited, encouraged, and modeled, we can occasionally leave our students alone: to experiment, struggle, and create meaning on their own. After all, teachers often over-respond to and over-mark student writing. Sometimes, the best kind of response to their work is no response at all: to count their journal pages but not read them, to check off their completion of assignments but not “correct” them, to have due dates but build in as much time as possible for students to work through their ideas and problems.
But there are limits to such a “hands-off” pedagogy. As more experienced writers than our students, and as members of disciplinary and professional communities they wish to join, we have much to offer them as responsive readers. Response here refers to the whole panoply of ways we can comment on our students’ writing. Response can be oral or written, marginal or terminal, minimal or substantive, purposive or unintended, beneficial or paralyzing. Sometimes the response students most need from us is simple engagement with what they’re writing about; they need for us, that is, to be readers, people genuinely interested in and predisposed to learn from the text in front of them. The appropriate response to a student’s draft, therefore, may not be criticism or error-detection but summary, say-back, or re-description: e.g., “So what you’re saying is X – that makes sense to me though I’d never thought of it that way before.” Or: “This is interesting – the way X and Y relate in this unexpected fashion.” Engagement can also be personal: “I remember once when I was in a similar situation . . .” And of course it can be oppositional, too, but ideally in a way that shows the paper is working because it’s provoking you to think: “I’m not sure I buy your argument here – doesn’t researcher X show us that . . ?”
Of course, there’s also a role for evaluation of student writing, explicit judgment about how the text stacks up according to the criteria of the assignment that prompted it. But remember that such evaluation need not always be negative. Research shows that the vast majority of teacher comments on student writing are negative (see Donald A. Daiker, “Learning to Praise” in Writing and Response, ed. Chris Anson [NCTE, 1989]). Thus, we should be in the habit of praising our students’ writing as much as we criticize it – and not just to keep them from getting discouraged but also to point out sincerely what they’re doing well in their writing because those are the strategies they need to repeat and the passages they should be elaborating.
Critical evaluation of students’ writing, meanwhile, should be predominantly formative rather than summative, oriented towards helping students improve their papers (whether present or future ones) rather than simply criticizing them. Such evaluation often works best by asking questions, posing alternatives, communicating honestly where, as a reader, you were confused or unpersuaded in a paper.
Finally, summative evaluation – when students are told, through a final grade, how their writing ultimately measures up – has a role in the writing class, but it should as much as possible be 1) deferred to the end of each unit or the semester as a whole, 2) dispersed among a variety of evaluators other than the teacher, and 3) conducted in as humane a way as possible.
Before turning to a description of some actual grading systems for the writing classroom, here’s a few extra tips for evaluating your students’ work:
1. Embed opportunities for students to evaluate themselves in your course, to reflect on their work in cover letters and other reflective writing assignments.
2. Occasionally do your own assignments and see for yourself what it’s like to write under the conditions you set for your students.
3. As much as possible, separate response and grading; and conduct the former as a reader not an evaluator.
4. Make your grading as transparent as possible: talk with your students about grading and give them chances to read sample papers and discuss criteria.
5. For students who are upset or confused about a paper grade right after receiving it, I often ask them to wait 24 hours before I’ll talk to them – the goal is to get them to first calmly re-read and think carefully about the assignment, their paper, and your comments.
Now, here are some alternative "systems" for grading student writing:
Updated September 3, 2008
