There are different kinds of feedback you can provide on student writing, and these are roughly divided into the categories of “formative” and “summative.”įormative feedback is given on work in progress it is provided with an eye toward project development, or revision. The five strategies in this guide ask you to think about:įormative and Summative Assessment: Key Differences These approaches also, importantly, improve your teaching efficiencies and benefit student learning.
That leads to more equitable impacts on students. While refusing to give grades on principle is not a decision most instructors have the power to make, there are approaches you can take to grading writing that help mitigate biases inherent in all of us as individuals, and in the disciplines in which we teach. In fact, there’s something wrong with judgment itself in writing classrooms. If we are beyond the old-fashion bigotry and bias, then what we are saying is that there is something wrong with the academic discourse itself, something wrong with judging everyone against an academic discourse that clearly privileges middle class white students. Indeed, these disparities are deeply entrenched in the very discourses we are trying to get our students to learn. As writing assessment scholar Asao Inoue writes in his book Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies, Abundant research shows that ostensibly "colorblind" or "neutral" assessment practices tend to have disparate impacts on students. The most successful assessment of student writing happens throughout the writing process, from assignment (and course) design, to final grades.Īlso, whether or not we choose to embrace the reality, writing (and all) assessment has important implications for equity and inclusion in our teaching. But grading, which is more holistically known as assessment, is much more than a final score.
When we imagine grading our students’ written assignments, many of us visualize a single letter or number, perhaps accompanied by a few sentences of commentary, written on a student’s final draft (or typed into a box in Canvas).