Written Feedback on Assignments

At many pages of this site, feedback between teachers and students has been framed in dialectical terms, with an effort toward drawing attention to how dynamic the back and forth can be—how many opportunities for listening and responding there are throughout a semester together. On this page, the frame will be more narrow. Here, we're talking about the moment to which instructor feedback on writing is reduced—sitting down with a pile of papers—and the goal is to break things down into concrete steps and demystify the process. Here's a reliable approach: 

1. Reread the prompt and/or rubric and make sure you know what elements you're looking for. If you don't have a rubric, create one. Having a rubric will give you the filters through which to read each essay and keep your comments focused on the elements that are aligned with the assignment. 
2. Make margin comments as you read. These individual comments are a running description of how moments in the essay reflect elements of the rubric, and they're the basis for the more synthetic end comment you'll write. 
3. Write an end comment addressed to the writer. This feedback letter allows you to provide an evidence-based assessment based on your margin comments. It doesn't need to be—and probably shouldn't be—very long, but it should organize your margin feedback into a handful of categories that identify strengths as well as areas for improvement using examples from the student's writing.  

Each phase of written feedback has its own best practices, and following the best practices for one will make it easier to follow them for the others. Here's a brief overview of each phase: 

Reading the prompt + rubric

• All of the criteria you include in your rubric should be "nameable" (e.g., arguable thesis, sources from assigned readings, 5 pages long), and those naming conventions should be stable. 
• How you approach evaluating the criteria should reflect what students have learned in your course (e.g., "what an arguable thesis for our assignment looks like" was presumably an exercise in section at some point). Teach what you give feedback on; give feedback on what you teach. 

Margin Comments 

• Observe and comment on patterns (= not every instance) 
• Stick to criteria from your rubric (= let the rest go) 
• "Name" a specific criterion from the rubric in as many comments as possible, and unpack your observation. In an essay where students have been asked to use source x to look at y, that might mean a margin comment like: “Great use of an example from x to support your upcoming analysis about y,” rather than one like "great" or like "!")
• Avoid a negative tone, and keep your comments focused on the argument, rather than the writer (e.g., "this claim isn't supported by any evidence," rather than "you're not supporting your claim here.")  

End Comment / Feedback Letter 

• Restate the piece's main point or idea, so that it's clear you engaged with its overarching goals 
• Address its strengths, using criteria from the rubric and specific examples (avoid vague gestures such as, "There were some great moments here, but...") 
• Address its areas for improvement, using criteria from the rubric and specific examples + actionable guidance on how to improve 
• Break your end comment up into clear categories, e.g., bullets for a handful of categories that are themselves criteria from the rubric 
• Limit yourself to 3–5 categories, and order them so that they reflect the priorities of the assignment prompt + rubric 
• Remember that your end comment is an evidence-based argument