Responding to Communication Assignments

Communication activities in a class should serve various needs and thus will assume various forms. Students will write short responses, hold in-class debates, and develop polished course projects.  They will make speeches, critique others work, and analyze course reading.  Like the communicative activities themselves, your responses to the activities serve various needs and will appear in various forms.  Sometimes you might write a short note; sometimes, dictate a short paragraph on a tape.

Regardless of the form comments take, ensure that your comments feature a concern for instruction. "The only appropriate comments on student [work]," Erika Lindemann explains, "is to offer feedback and guide learning" (A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers 208).  John Bean likewise emphasizes the need to display interest in what the student learns.  Focus on education not frustration, he urges.  Though students' attempts to convey course material are sometimes frustrating, instructors "need to remember [their] purpose, which is not to point out everything wrong with a paper but to facilitate improvement" both in content and presentation (Engaging Ideas 240-41).

Important maxims to remember: All assignments do not have to be "graded."  All reactions do not need rigorous explanation. Following these maxims will diminish your frustration with student performance and help you focus on improving their learning.

Often, instructors assume responsibility for students' work; they believe that they need to inform students of every error in their texts so that the students will present material appropriately the next time.  Though you should give guidance and assist a student in developing his or her communicative skills, you should not assume that you need to correct all the student's mistakes - or even indicate all of them.  The work is, after all, the student's work; any mistakes, his or hers, David Jolliffe explains. The student is responsible for presenting work in a fashion that a particular audience will accept (SIUC Communication Across the Curriculum Lecture Series, 23 April 1999).

To assist teachers in commenting on students' work, Erika Lindemann offers these six ideas as guidelines:

1.       development of communicative proficiency is a slow process that demands time and opportunity

2.       comments that teachers make on student work creates the environment in which students practice writing and speaking

3.       communicative skills develop largely from "risk-taking" in communicative acts, from "playing" with ways of presenting material

4.       students need to see goals, understand when they meet them, and be able to assess their own progress toward these goals

5.       communication is a communal endeavor and learning to communicate requires interaction with a real audience

6.       comments on students work must emerge from an understanding of what fosters better communication: indicating what students do well, using the students' own work to treat good communication rather than presenting rules, providing feedback as readers, assessing growth without comparing them to one another or expecting them to display mastery (A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers 210-11, citing Mary Beaven's Evaluating Writing)

Responding to Informal or Preparatory Assignments

You do not need to evaluate shorter assignments (such as the Communicating-to-Learn assignments or Rhetorical Planning assignments) as polished products. You can simply help students clarify and develop their ideas, apprehend course material, and prepare for tests and course projects. Writing and speaking of this caliber could be assessed not as much for accuracy or rhetorical efficacy as on evidence of  "good faith" engagement.  Certainly, concern for writing and speaking should be expressed (especially if the work is preparatory for a large project); yet, the preparatory and informal assignments should provide forums for the "risk taking" that good communication demands, and comments on rhetorical efficacy should be tempered by an appreciation of these gambles.

Responses to this work do not have to be long. On much of the work, you could respond with a simple "plus" "check," or "minus," or with a point system. When students turn in extra credit work, engage in personal response writing, or write in journals, the you might use "+ x points," "Credit / No Credit," or a letter grade with comments.

Out-of-class informal work could receive short responses from you based only on content. Did the student answer the question correctly or understand the main idea of the chapter? Did the student evidence an honest struggle with the ideas? Rhetorical Planning assignments could receive your suggestions on both content and form, since students will use your comments to prepare major course projects. In either case, emphasize an interest in witnessing a genuine struggle with the course material and a genuine attempt to convey this struggle through effective language.

You can similarly treat and respond to in-class work. Encourage students to see such activities as opportunities to raise issues that you might not raise, to contribute to the plan of the course, to use one another as learning resources. To check on students' active participation in classroom rhetorical activities, you could do the following:

Ø       Walk around the room and read or listen over students' shoulders

Ø       Ask a few students to present their work

Ø       Require groups to produce an "artifact" as evidence of work

Ø       Randomly collect a few papers each time you assign in-class work

Ø       Have students post work to the class listserv

When you respond to these assignments, explain that the assignments serve as opportunities to investigate . . . to learn . . . to prepare . . . and, most of all, to engage you in a dialogue in which an official grade is not an issue.

If the work serves as preparation for an officially graded activity, retain the same openness but use the official guidelines for the project and discipline standards to formulate your responses.  John Bean recommends treating the following general aspects in a response to a draft of a course paper:

 

Ø       The draft's adherence to assignment criteria/guidelines

Ø       The appearance of a thesis and the appropriateness of its problem or question

Ø       The quality of the argument that the thesis leads to

Ø       The microlevel (paragraphs and sentences) organization (Engaging Ideas 243)

  Although the responses on preparatory work should provide guidance, they do not have to be lengthy.  When students turn in Rhetorical Planning work, your comments will need to be insightful but not exhaustive.  A few marginal comments and a general comment at the end will help students. Or you could have students provide you with an audio tape on which you briefly explain your reaction to their work and suggestions for revision. You should provide them with guidance for the improvement of an assignment, not a checklist to get an "A."  Indications of how a reader will receive their work generally helps students more than long explanations of the rules. Avoid nebulous comments; be clear.  But do not paralyze the student - or yourself - with numerous editorial corrections and long comments about approaches that should have been used.  Again, the paper or speech or presentation or webpage is not yours. You are neither the author nor the editor; you are an expert reader and teacher.  Make the students assume responsibility for their work and for meeting the conventions of the discipline.

Responding to Formal Course Work

Naturally, the formal projects in the course (presentations, speeches, papers, essay exams) deserve significant attention and high standards.  Though a CAC program should foster exploration of formal conventions, it should not dismiss the importance of proper presentation.  In the large course projects, you will likely look for clear and effective explanations of course material, coherent presentations of information, and understandable descriptions of students' own ideas. You will expect students to understand that the rhetorical situations of larger projects involve conventions that demand attention, guidelines that demand adherence.  In many courses, the larger projects simulate a professional activity.  Consequently, you should respond to these projects  as a professional within the framework of some professional norms.  Remember that you are an expert reader who is providing guidance, and your responses should convey this expertise and role by teaching students the following:

 

Ø       A particular instructional goal

Ø       The specific criteria to be used in the assessment

Ø       What an experienced reader would see in their work

  Each of these needs some further words of explanation.

 

Instructional Goal: To respond to your students' work effectively, you will need to have a particular reason for your response. Instructors comment on students work for a variety of reasons:

 

Ø       To show that he or she has read the paper

Ø       To indicate strengths of the paper and points for future development

Ø       To suggest improvements for another version or another rhetorical situation

Ø       To explain reasons for the grade

 

The selection of one of these reasons does not necessarily exclude comments relating to another. But you should communicate to your students your primary reason for commenting on their work and, then, consistently meet that goal on each student's assignment.

 

Grading Criteria: Writers and speakers must consider a variety of factors each time they convey a message. They must consider their roles, the roles of their audiences, and the nature of their subjects. Many apprentice writers (and even established professionals) are not aware of all the factors that constitute an effective act of communication; many have difficulty recalling all the formal conventions or requirements during the act of composition. Consequently, you should develop clear criteria for each assignment, include them in the explanation of the assignment, and respond to students' work applying these criteria. Such standards of judgment will make the act of responding easier for you and more enlightening for the students.

 

An experiment by Paul Diedrich (Measuring Growth in English) demonstrates the need for clear criteria. Diedrich collected three hundred essays from first-year students in a number of schools. Then, he gave these to people in six different professions for assessment.  None of the essays received less than five different grades.  The result of the experiment indicates that instructors need to tell their students what they will look for in assignment because what constitutes good communication is often difficult to determine (Engaging Ideas 255-56).

 

The criteria for assessment should emerge from the assignment itself; and they should reflect the communicative environment in which the student will write or speak. The criteria should indicate your concerns about the content of the piece as well as your concerns about the modes of presentation. If, for instance, you had assigned a journalism article in which the student pretends to report for an Athenian daily the foundation of the Plato's Academy, you might require that the student discuss Plato's relationship to Socrates and how this relationship influenced the school; and you might require the student to integrate secondary sources and use a variety of effective journalistic attribution techniques to integrate these sources.

 

A good way to use criteria is to provide a numbered list at the end of an assignment that presents the criteria for the assignment. Then, when you make comments on the students' papers, you can refer to these criteria by using the numbers as a form of shorthand. This approach makes responding easier-without diminishing the efficacy of responses-and, more importantly, it makes the students aware of particular conventions and the need to employ the assignment as a guide for their work.

 

Commenting on Work: Commenting on a student's paper is a critical act in instruction.  In your comments, students discover how an audience has reacted to their ideas and presentation.  Thus, you should try emphasize your role as a reader engaging a text.  Again, students need to have the sense that they are communicating with real audiences.

 

Your responses can appear in a variety of forms and lengths.  Different teachers will use different kinds of comments; different assignments will require different kinds of responses.  Simply make sure that your comments are guided by the rhetorical situation, particularly the characteristics established by an assignment's criteria.  Always provide your students with encouragement and guidance; avoid indicating things that "should have been done" if students will not have the opportunity to revise the material. These suggestions are likely familiar, but sometimes when students do not include material that has been covered in class, comments - particularly the indications of absences - communicate frustration rather than an interest in instruction.

The amount of comments varies according to each instructor, but a generally effective maxim to follow is "less is more." Students are more likely to benefit from a few informative words and phrases than from a paper blushing with an instructional gloss. Written responses should be well-focused, not sprawling or comprehensive.

 

Even though you should try to limit your comments so that students can manage revision and you can manage assessment, you should not feel compelled to limit your comments to content area.  Form affects content; poor presentation of ideas will diminish the value of the information. Furthermore, you are an expert reader who knows what the communicative standards are, and you should comment when a student (ineffectively) deviates from those norms.  Provide students with some idea of what interferes with your understanding of their work, draw their attention to a few examples of the interference, and ask them to tend to this issue.

 

When you make comments on students work, you can use two forms of commentary: (1) marginal notes and (2) summary comments.

 

Marginal notes act as a "reader's gloss."  They effectively communicate your immediate reaction to a rhetorical approach, to an idea, or to an interpretation.  When used effectively, they can simulate a live audience, suggesting where you follow an argument and where you begin to lose an argument, where you agree and wish to hear more and where you disagree to such an extent that you're no longer willing to pay attention.  These notes usually emphasize a "dialogic" treatment of a project; they suggest that the teacher is in a dialogue with the student about the topic and its presentation. The marginal comments are particularly effective at making suggestions about style because the students are more likely to see how their style is facilitating or impeding comprehension.

 

These instructive glosses can be facilitated by using the numbered criteria list.  When a student effectively meets a criterion you can use the number to indicate what the student has done well.  For example, if the sixth criterion for a paper is that students analyze a subject critically and you come to a point at which the student has provided a particularly trenchant critique you might write "#6 +" in the margin to indicate that a student has well met the sixth criterion; or if the student has not analyzed the subject effectively, you could write "See #6."

 

Though "marginal" notation is most applicable to writing, you can use a similar approach in the treatment of oral texts. When assessing oral presentations, you can indicate points in the presentation (by quoting briefly or by marking the time) and, then, provide a response to the presentation at that point. You might even tape the presentation, and, using a dual-deck tape recorder, make a new copy of the presentation in which you stop the original recording to make comments about the presentation on the second recording.

 

When you do use marginal notes for comments, remember the following:

 

Ø       Act as a teacher in a discipline rather than as a proofreader, editor, or judge

Ø       Provide students with a model of good communication by indicating when their thinking, style, or organization is especially effective

Ø       Avoid pinpointing issues of diction and sentence structure that are matters of taste, but do let students know when problems with grammar, spelling, punctuation, and word-choice interfere with your ability to understand the work (Kansas University's "Writing Consulting: Faculty Resources" webpage, http://www.ukans.edu/~write).

 

Summary Comments provide an overall impression of the work and appear on a separate sheet or at the end of a paper.  These comments establish how successfully the student addressed an assignment and usually serve as a good place to suggest approaches to future assignments and to establish goals for the student. In the summary comments, you should use the criteria for the assignment to indicate both strengths and weaknesses with the intent of providing a guide for the student's future work. Remember to respect the student's work and to respond to the work rather than the student.

 

David Jolliffe recommends that instructors use a pithy end comment that assesses the student's work in three categories: (1) quality, organization, and development of ideas (2) sentence completeness, variety, and diction (3) grammar, usage, mechanics, and spelling.  Jolliffe suggests that instructors provide one positive sentence and one corrective sentence for each category.  Avoid conjunctions such as but, yet, still, however, when you make the two comments, he urges, as the conjunction will diminish the praise.

 

In general, a good way to approach responding to writing is to approach it as a conversation with the student in a professional forum. Provide students with ideas about how you are reacting to their work as a member of professional community that they have elected to join by (1) enrolling in the class and (2) attempting to communicate with you.

 

When responding to work, instructors should keep in mind the following:

 

Ø       Use two test questions to determine the quality of the paper and the kind of response needed: (a) does the text convey an appropriate amount of information? (b) is the style reasonably clear, free of distracting errors in punctuation and of syntactic features that complicate reading?

Ø       Keep in mind that correcting stylistic faults seldom changes students' writing

Ø       Avoid jokes, sarcasm and cynicism

Ø       Consider marking one paragraph for stylistic difficulties and having the student edit the rest of the paper or marking problem areas with checks in the margin, letting the student edit

Ø       Encourage students to seek assistance from fellow students, faculty mentors, and the SIUC Writing Centers (drawn in part from Kansas University's "Writing Consulting: Faculty Resources")

 

Holistic Grading. Generally, communication is effective and interesting not when it meets this or that particular characteristic but, rather, when it appeals to an audience in a general, comprehensive way.   People usually appreciate written and spoken texts because they find the overall texts appealing, and this sense of overall quality is often hard to convey to students.  Even if a writer or speaker "nails" x, y, and z, a text may fail to interest.

 

One way to employ this intuitive aspect of communication is to use holistic grading.  In this approach, the instructor develops criteria but develops the criteria for each paper along the grade scale and refers to these criteria in an end comment.  Though these criteria can identify particular traits of the papers (Bean Engaging Ideas 257), they likely work best when they generally describe papers and convey the general intuitive sense of efficacy. Instructors can direct their students to these general descriptions.

 

To employ this holistic method, you will first need to develop a rubric which indicates the characteristics of papers along the scale, as in the following example:

 

Level 6

Very well organized, often carefully reasoned or narrated

Very good sense of unity

Provides specific or concrete examples from the writer's experience

Frequent Sentence Variation

Good word choice that may be unusually striking, vivid, or creative

Virtually free of grammatical or mechanical errors

Level 5

Well organized

Good sense of unity

Cites some examples, but they might be fairly general

Frequent sentence variation

Good word choice that may be vivid or striking

Few, if any, grammatical or mechanical errors

Level 4

Paper is organized, but it may be weak in logic or example

Sense of unity, although transitions may be lacking

Some sentence variation

Cites some examples, but they are general or unexplained

Appropriate word choice for college-level writing, but word choice may sometimes be elementary

Some errors in grammar and mechanics, but these errors do not necessarily distract the reader from the continuity of the paper

Level 3

Paper attempts to organize topic but fails due to faulty logic, imprecise examples, or superfluous ideas

Little or no sense of unity

May not cite any examples or does so poorly

Some sentence variation

Repetitious or poor word choice

Errors in grammar and mechanics distract the reader from the content and continuity of the paper

Level 2

Paper attempts to develop topic but fails due to faulty logic, imprecise examples, or superfluous ideas

Little or no sense of unity

Cites no examples

Little or no sentence variation

Repetitious or poor word choice

Numerous errors in grammar and mechanics

Level 1

Lack of topic development

Lack of unity

Little or no sentence variation

Repetitious or poor word choice

Numerous errors in grammar and mechanics

 

To develop such a "holistic spectrum," you might refer to papers or other projects that you have graded and saved.  Identify what makes the better work strong, the inadequate work weak; then list these characteristics along the spectrum of grades.  When you assess students' work, refer to the holistic spectrum and use it to make overall, impressionistic comments about the students' work.

 

To ensure that students understand how you will assess their work and that they understand the characteristics of good and poor work, you could involve the students with the development of the holistic scale.  Have them read a number of papers and determine what constitutes good work, average work, and poor work.  Then, jointly develop the criteria.  Finally, to habituate them to these standards, have a "norming session" during one class period in which students again read papers and  assign them holistic grades.  Have the students discuss the grades they assigned to the papers so that they all understand the features of various papers along the holistic scale. Such a session will help students understand your norms for evaluating work and provide them with models for developing class projects.

CONCLUSION