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• Responding to Student Writing

Writing Across the Curriculum Workshop Center for
Educational Practice
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Promoting Reflective Practice

• Context
• Assessment as
• Continual Improvement

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Promoting Effective Learning

• Evaluating student writing
• vs
• Evaluating the success of how we are responding
  to student writing

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Student Writing Problems

• On left side of page,
• make a list
• of student writing problems
• you commonly encounter

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Responding to Student Writing

• On right side of page,
• make a list of ways
• you commonly respond
• to these problems

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An Assessment Process

• Continuous improvement cycle
• applied to responding to
• and evaluating student writing

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Response
Evaluate
Unreflective Practice
Assignment
Blame
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Kinds of Student Errors

• Process or Product tasks?

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Process Tasks

• Critical reading
• Conducting research
• Analyzing information
• Drawing conclusions
• Writing process

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Product Tasks

• Number of pages or words
• Focus, organization, development
• Presentation format
• Documentation format
• Style and correctness

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Response
Evaluate
Reflective Practice
Assignment
Revise
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Revising Assignment Design
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Issues in Assignment Design

• Distinguishing between what we want students to
  do and how we want them to communicate what
  theyve done.

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Revising Assignment

• Separate process and product tasks and reorder,
  putting process tasks first and then product
  tasks second.

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Improving Process

• Demonstrate process
• Support process
• Evaluate process

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Improving Product

• Samples of product
• Review work-in-progress
• Evaluation criteria

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Evaluation Criteria
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Responding to Error

• Intensive Correction
• vs
• Minimal Marking

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Intensive Correction

• Doesnt teach students to write better
• Students copy what is edited
• Teacher is responsible for quality of writing
• Time-consuming

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• Steven Zemelman and Harvey Daniels in A Community
  of Writers argue,
•  If we could prove that intensive correction
  works, that it is good formative evaluation, that
  students writing grows reliably and measurably
  as a result of such feedback, we could start
  weighing its costs in morale against gains.
• But the research, the history, the feeling in our
  hearts--all of these sources tell us that the
  formative gains just arent there.
• What intensive marking provides, unfortunately,
  is only discouragement--or the message that
  writing is a perfectionists game that growing,
  exploring writers cant really win. (218)

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Minimal Marking

• Teaches students to write better
• Students fix what has been marked
• Student is responsible for quality of writing
• Not as time-consuming

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Minimal Marking
Incorrect word Incorrect sentence Insertion Revers
al Delete Redundancy Yes! Wow!
Upper case/lower case Join Provide more
support Awkward phrasing Combine ideas for
concision
New Paragraph
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• Effective Assignment Design
• Support Process
• Models
• Evaluation Criteria
• Minimal Marking