grading and feedback

What We Gripe about When We Gripe about Grammar

Over 40 years of teaching, I’ve been to enough departmental grading norming sessions and scoring workshops to notice that not even English teachers agree on exactly what the term grammar means. For example, some of my colleagues get really bent out of shape when a

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How to Make Your Feedback More Effective

A common faculty complaint is that students do not read their feedback. This is usually chalked up to laziness or disinterest in learning. But neither explanation has ever rung true with me. Everyone likes, and wants, to learn, and in my experience, nearly all students

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Teachable Moments: The Grading Conference

Grading student papers may be the college instructor’s least pleasant duty. Most of us carefully mark each page, noting problems, questioning assumptions, and offering additional information, many times on the final version of the essay when it is too late to make improvements. I have

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Actionable Feedback in the Undergraduate Curriculum

When we return work to our students, we hope that they will study our feedback carefully and strive to improve their writing on the next assignment. Indeed, there are times when faculty may observe a student receiving a paper, looking for the grade, and then

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An Empathetic Approach to Writing Rubrics

“Response shows a complete lack of understanding.”
“Piece had no style or voice.”
“Position is incoherent.”
“Thesis is utterly incompetent.”
“Weak.”
“Ineffective.”
“Unsatisfactory.”

This is some of the discouraging feedback that we found in an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional survey of

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What Student Feedback Literacy Entails

Student feedback literacy—Is it meaningless academic jargon or destined to become a trendy handle? Neither is my hope for this moniker. While the term was originally defined as a student’s ability to read, interpret, and use written feedback, Carless and Boud (2018) enhance its definition

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A Memo to Students about Unexpected Grades

It doesn’t make any sense. You worked hard on that assignment, studied long hours for the test. You’re upset—texting complaints and spouting off to friends. Why not talk to me? Let me start with some reasons why you should.

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