Giving Feedback to Students

Regardless of the genre or modality, deciding how to give feedback on an assignment is a matter of identifying what students are being asked to do and knowing what counts as doing it well. From that perspective, the best place to start (as with #1 here above) is with the prompt + rubric, whether that means meeting with your teaching team to look at some sample submissions of student work and norm feedback across the course (before returning feedback to your students) or doing the assignment decoder exercise for TFs & TAs on your own before sitting down with your students' submissions.

In many cases, the biggest question for instructors in this scenario is about the modality, e.g., a website or museum curation, and a few of the most common strategies for approaching this are: 

1. Making sure the rubric includes the modality-specific features and criteria you'll be using for feedback on the assignment. For most Gen Ed assignments, mastery of the modality isn't a primary (or secondary) learning objective. Instead, the modality is being used as a way to apply other skills, such as awareness of audience, or putting kinds of evidence into dialogue, or synthesizing concepts from the course into a proposed solution to a real-world problem. Those are things that you can evaluate, and a useful way of doing so is with an "artist statement."
    
2. Using artist statements to allow students to articulate the goals they had for working in the modality at hand. By including elements of the rubric into the "questions to answer" for the artist statement itself, you can give students the chance to engage in metacognitive reflection on their own work and get a clearer sense of how the process they engaged in—apart from the product—did or did not produce evidence of how well they met the objectives and goals of the assignment. In that sense, an artist statement is a cover letter that asks students to evaluate their own learning using elements of the same rubric you'll be using to give your own feedback. For more on using artist statements to respond to student work, see the Bok Center's advice on "Responding to Creative Assignments." 

Each of the topics in this section on giving feedback, from Creating an Environment for Feedback to Grading, is covered in greater depth at its own individual page. For a comprehensive self-guided module on giving students written feedback, you can register for "Responding to Student Writing" at the Bok Center's Hit the Ground Running Canvas site.