Theory and practice

Austenian Incorrectness and Valuable Assessment:

Communicating Feedback and Assessment Criteria to Composition Students

The English Major Friend

There I was, in the middle of my living room floor with the pages of my best friend’s Jane Austen analysis essay spread around me like bird wings that were getting us nowhere. Steaming coffee and desperation lined my voice as I pleaded with her to change one of her sentences. 

“Come on, girl. Trust me you need to change this sentence. It doesn’t sound right.” 

“Why?” she asked. 

Why? “Why? Because, it doesn’t sound right.” 

And so we went on like that for roughly an hour. It had always been my duty as the designated English Major Friend to give my friends feedback on their papers. The above conversation illustrates how that process would usually go. 

Vetoing Vagueness

Now, it wasn’t my friend’s fault that she couldn’t turn my feedback—“it doesn’t sound right”—into a tangible fix. There are a number of things that could make a sentence sound odd. Maybe the tone of that one sentence did not match the tone of the rest of the paper; maybe the punctuation was creating unnatural pauses; maybe it was becoming too long for the reader to follow. The list could go on. 

Of course, critiquing a paper on a sentence-structure level is only addressing what we in the English field would call local concerns—or concerns that are found within the smaller units of language within a piece of writing. As composition teachers, however, we tend to focus on global concerns—or concerns that “focus more on the overall piece of writing and less on the specific moments in and of themselves” (“Assessing Student Writing”) because global-based feedback tends to be more useful for students without being overwhelming. That is, when it’s given with great care and informed deliberateness. 

Imagine, though, that a student was given the same sort of vague feedback, but in the context of addressing global concerns. That could look like anything from an instructor saying, “Wow! This paper is really good! Excellent work!” to an instructor saying, “It seems like you didn’t understand the assignment—please revise.” The student would be inclined to wonder What was good about my paper? How can I replicate those things? Or perhaps How did I not show my understanding? What aspects need revision?

And even if they aren’t explicitly wondering those things, they would still probably find themselves sitting in a pile of flightless papers, staring up at a dormitory ceiling, and wondering where on earth to go from there.

Crafting Criteria

The key to helping students get the most out of feedback is carefully crafting the feedback itself. To give effective feedback, instructors must have specific sets of criteria for evaluation in mind, and that criteria can then serve as a lens for viewing student work. And it helps to make those criteria “measurable” or tangible because vague, abstract concepts like “ ‘[u]nderstanding’ or ‘knowing’ [are] not easily measured, but what students DO show in their understanding and knowledge can be” (“Tips for Writing a Strong Rubric”). 

My best friend probably wouldn’t have been so left in the dark if I could have pinpointed what sounded weird within her sentence. Part of the problem, of course could have been my expert blind spot as an avid reader and frequent essay writer. Teachers themselves often don’t realize or fully see the ways in which they might need to break down feedback and revision tasks for students because, well, let’s face it, your years of analyzing our Dearest Jane have probably made you a little out of touch with both modern times and the beginner mindsets of your students. (I’m kidding about that first part, of course. There’s nothing more relevant than Mr. Darcy. Ever. Well, except maybe Mr. Knightley.) 

Embracing the many pathways and steps within student writing processes is necessary for aiding their development. That means allowing students to draft and revise on multiple occasions and at multiple writing stages. While it may seem more daunting and time-consuming to incorporate several tasks and feedback checkpoints into the composition classroom, it can actually make for a more helpful—and more approachable—class structure. Such practices “save time in the long run” since they allow “you to make early interventions that can range from minor suggestions to recommending [students] focus on a different topic” (“Tips for Teaching and Assessing Writing”). After all, giving students early, frequent, and specific feedback on smaller assignments like thesis statement drafts can help them gain more writing practice and a better understanding of how to produce a more effective high-stakes piece by the end of the course.

Communicating Criteria in the Classroom

As English instructors, we must make the concepts of clear and concise communication not only featured topics within the content of our courses but also core components of the very structural makeup of our teaching. So, we must make the determined measures of success in our classrooms and our individual assignments known to students. How do we do this, exactly? Creating rubrics based on established learning objectives—those breakdowns of how students can display their levels of understanding, for instance—is a good place to start.  

While the practice of using a rubric has been a long-standing one in many composition classrooms, there are still a fair amount of writing and communication-based courses that do not utilize rubrics of any kind. In my time as a writing assistant at the KSU Writing Center, I have seen many examples of rubric-less assignments, even high stakes ones. As you can probably guess, the majority of my sessions with these students are usually centered around trying to help them figure out if they’re completing the assignment correctly. 

It’s important to remember that, even if the assignment you’ve given students is one that has frequently defined rules and conventions within our field, that doesn’t mean students will understand how to follow those conventions, even after you’ve discussed them. It also doesn’t mean that they will know what you—their instructor, their guide—will value most within the many possibilities that exist regarding the expressions and nuances of those rules and conventions. Take, for example, the annotated bibliography. While students could easily hear about the common components of annotated bibliographies (such as the citation, and then, of course, the annotation) in the classroom or read about them online, that doesn’t mean they’re getting the full picture of what you expect from their annotated bibliographies within the realm of those components without clearly identified criteria; a rubric provides an organized and easily accessible space for teachers to define those criteria and for students to read those criteria. Annotations within bibliographies can include more source evaluative components; they can include differing degrees of source summary; they can be formatted according to many different style guides (MLA, Chicago, etc.). And while written assignment guidelines are nice for providing basic instructions, they don’t do the job of rubrics in showing how points will be dispersed for satisfactory papers or assignments.  

So, here’s to specific feedback, to criteria, to rubrics, and, heck, to Jane Austen! May your students never write another Austenian paper (or any assignment) without clear expectations or feedback ever again.