Responding to Student Writing

The Role of Teacher Response in Student Success

Teachers across the disciplines recognize the importance of responding to their students’ writing. That doesn’t prevent them from sometimes dreading the physical burden that such response can entail—particularly when teaching large classes. How can faculty members most effectively and efficiently fulfill this important responsibility?

A recent Harvard study provides useful suggestions for faculty members. This article will provide a brief overview of this study and outline its implications for teachers.

Begun in the fall of 1997, the Harvard Study of Undergraduate Writing, directed by Nancy Sommers, followed four hundred students from their freshman year through graduation in 2001, carefully examining these students’ experiences with teacher feedback. Through surveys, interviews with students, and careful analysis of all of their papers, researchers found that effective teacher response played a crucial role in student success at college:

[F]eedback plays a leading role in undergraduate writing development when, but only when, students and teachers create a partnership through feedback—a transaction in which teachers engage with their students by treating them as apprentice scholars, offering honest critique paired with instruction (Nancy Sommers “Across” 250).

What students need most, the research concludes, is a sense of exchange, a sense of being involved in a dialogue with their teachers and being a part of the “conversation” taking place in academia. They need to feel that, even though they are novices, they are members of the college writing community whose voices matter.

Faculty members can help students feel like members of their disciplinary community by providing feedback that is detailed, timely, and directed specifically to each student and essay. Such response from teachers engages with the WHAT of a student’s paper: what the student is saying, not just how she or he is saying it. It addresses the student, not the paper and not simply the problems in a paper.

Further, the Harvard Study concludes that identifying and correcting problems should not be the primary goal of response. Often, instructors believe that they are not doing their job unless they identify every problem—whether that problem is global (an over-reaching thesis or poor organization) or local (an error of usage, punctuation, or grammar). This is not to say that response should not point out limitations in students’ critical thinking and writing. The role of response is to provide guidance so students can improve their critical thinking and writing skills. But not all comments are equal. Vague comments or comments that feel rubberstamped do not encourage students’ growth. Students benefit from feedback that engages their ideas but also guides them toward expressing those ideas more clearly.

The Harvard study suggests that faculty members can most effectively and efficiently focus on content, rather than on error. Surface error can be dealt with by looking for and isolating patterns. Alternatively, teachers can follow the procedure suggested by Richard H. Haswell in his 1983 College English essay “Minimal Marking.”

All surface mistakes in a student’s paper are left totally unmarked within the text. . . .Each of these mistakes is indicated only with a check in the margin by the line in which it occurs. A line with two checks by it, for instance, means the presence of two errors, no more, within the boundary of that line (601).

Students are then given the opportunity to identify and correct these errors. In his study, Haswell found that when given the opportunity to self-correct students could identify 61.1% of their errors on their own. They needed the help of their teacher or of a handbook to identify the remaining errors.

When teachers focus on providing response specific to each student and paper, they encourage students to feel that they are members of an academic community. Doing so is worth the effort, and it is actually far less stressful to approach response not as a chore of correction but rather as a chance to connect with a student.

April Carothers

April Carothers recently completed an MA in English with an emphasis in rhetoric and writing. This article an also be found here. Her thesis, A Circle of Response: Addressing the Tensions of Teacher Response to Student Writing, can be found on Amazon.com or here.

Works Cited

Haswell, Richard. “Minimal Marking.” College English 45.6. NCTE (Oct. 1983): 600-604.
Sommers, Nancy. “Across the Drafts.” “Re-Visions: Rethinking Nancy Sommers’s ‘Responding to Student Writing,’ 1982.” Ed. Deborah H. Holdstein. College Composition and Communication 58.2 (December 2006): 246- 66.
---. HWP Harvard Writing Project Bulletin. Special Issue: Responding to Student Writing. The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2000.

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