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WORKING WITH STUDENT WRITING
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Provide your students with a handout or rubric that gives specific guidelines, or a checklist to clarify your expectations.
Articulate your learning objectives for the assignment. Do you want students to simply demonstrate an understanding of the material, or would you rather they extend that knowledge by synthesizing or applying what they’ve learned?
Good papers are easier and less time-consuming to grade than poor ones. Extra time spent giving students guidance through stepped assignments and multiple drafts reduces the amount of time spent on grading, and the students learn more through the process.
Define your policies about receiving, proofreading, and editing drafts.
Teach and require students to edit each other’s work effectively in peer review teams.
If you are designing your own assignment: How packed is students’ time in your course already? What do they have time for? How packed is your time? How long can you afford to spend teaching the assignment (if necessary) and reading through the students’ papers?
If you are parsing an assignment someone else has made, zero in on the steps and the learning objectives of each step in completing the assignment.
When you evaluate student work, keep your focus on the objectives you have in creating the assignment. Don’t be distracted by extraneous matters, such as marking superficial mistakes.
Creating and using a grading rubric helps allay students’ concerns (and perhaps yours) that grading writing is inherently subjective. It can also save you time by reducing grade challenges.
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