Tips for Providing Positive and Concise Feedback on Student Writing Javier Ospina & Ellen Ratajack Department of Psychology March 11, 2015

Why Be Positive and Concise?  It’s important to be positive  Important to motivate students and have them accept feedback  It’s important to be concise  Providing specific and clear feedback is best

Putting a Positive Spin on Feedback  Praise effort even when misguided  Find something to praise, even if it’s superficial  Resist non-commenting when things are fine  Use a “compliment sandwich”  Direct criticisms to the paper, praise to the student

Compliment “Sandwich” I thought you did a good job with this assignment. You clearly addressed each component required of the assignment, nice! The only thing that would have been helpful and completed your paper was to provide just a little bit of background information about the study. While your paper addressed all components of the assignment, it could have been written about any pop press and academic article. I wasn’t really sure which article you read until I looked at your references. In this case, one or two sentences quickly stating what the study was about would be helpful, but you still made strong arguments to support your stance.

Student Writing – Critiques? After reading the popular article in the Stage 2 paper, I did not think the article had a strong credibility. However, after reading the scholarly article, my opinion has changed because there was additional detailed information given about the methods used in the study. Instead of a condensed interpretation of the study and the results, we were given a more elaborate report of the experiment in the scholarly article. The popular article did not provide much specific information about how the study was conducted. It simply referred to the method by stating two sample groups were given different articles to read and told to remember the main points, followed by a recorded computer assignment. The scholarly article stated the number of participants, the average age, and whether it was predominately female or male (Schroder et al., 2014). The addition of these details shows a narrow target population, and allows the reader to develop a better sense of whom this study is centered around, and how big of a sample the results are based on.

General Tips for Efficient Grading  Don’t overcomment- stick to 1-3 comments per paragraph/section  Use stock comments when grading electronic copies  Pay attention to time- set a timer for each paper  Make sure you have enough time for grading

Writing Issues & Grammar  Identify patterns of errors and highlight a few examples  Stress to students the value of proofreading or reading aloud to self  Ask student to outline the argument in bullet points first, then write it out  If there’s a lot of clunky sentences, rewrite one and explain why the rewrite is better

Content  Use stock comments to explain core concepts  Write the appropriate terms (if they’re missing or used incorrectly), ask student to understand the difference for themselves  Know the text book/lecture material so you have something to direct students to  If there’s a lot of confusion, request to meet with student in person

Academic Dishonesty  Use SafeAssign to screen out based on percentage  Provide resources for proper citation on first offense  Instruct to avoid direct quotes  Paraphrasing is best

Conclusion  Positive and concise feedback is beneficial both for students and graders!  Maintain balance

Questions?

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