As we move towards the end of the semester, many faculty are feeling overwhelmed by the mounting stack of student writing awaiting their feedback. With this in mind, today, we’re offering tips for streamlining the process of giving feedback while actually boosting its effectiveness for students. Some of these strategies will be familiar to regular readers of the TWW blog and teaching resources.

Prioritize the Most Important Feedback

Faculty often feel pressure to comment on every issue of concern, lest they unintentionally seem to “excuse” an area students could productively address. This exhaustive commenting can be incredibly time-consuming for faculty, but the effort should help students … right?

Paradoxically, however, more feedback can actually lead to less productive revision experiences for student writers. When presented with a paper overflowing with marginal comments, students may be overwhelmed by the quantity of feedback and struggle to process and use it. Extensive feedback can be demoralizing and demotivating for student writers, just as nitpicky feedback from an overzealous Reviewer 2 raises faculty hackles. Responding to a deluge of comments can make any writer feel like they’re checking boxes, not thinking substantively about their choices and goals in writing. This is particularly true for student writers, who often already feel less ownership of their writing as they compose within the constraints of assignment requirements.

To facilitate more productive engagement with comments, prioritize: focus on just a few key strengths and areas for growth in each student’s work, rather than trying to comment on everything you see. As you share this feedback, it can be helpful to emphasize to students that you’re commenting on highest-priority areas to forestall potential misperceptions that any aspect of the paper you didn’t comment on is “already perfect.”

Focus on Higher-Order Feedback

As you prioritize your feedback, it can be helpful to attend to the distinction between higher-order concerns—global features of writing like content and organization—and lower- or later-order concerns—sentence-level, one-off issues like grammar mistakes and awkward phrasing. Experienced writers naturally focus on higher-order concerns first when revising their writing, as global changes have a greater impact on the overall quality of writing than sentence-level editing—and because they know they’ll need to proofread again after major revisions anyway.

As when revising our own writing, it’s helpful to focus our comments on student writing first and foremost on higher-order concerns. Doing so helps students prioritize: It’s tempting to dedicate the bulk of revision energy to easy-fix later-order corrections rather than grappling with complex higher-order rethinking when both options are available. Focusing on higher-order feedback is also the most pragmatic use of your time, since revising and removing language in a major revision usually obviates at least some of the later-order corrections that could be given on early drafts.

Prioritizing higher-order feedback needn’t mean that students never receive feedback on sentence-level errors, particularly if those errors are systematic or significantly impact the effectiveness of their writing. But it’s usually not helpful to directly edit students’ papers. Instead, strategies like minimal marking, described below, can allow you to provide efficient feedback on sentence-level issues without these comments overtaking the paper.

Set Yourself Up for Success: Hacks to Corral Your Commenting

Many faculty already aim to prioritize comments and focus on higher-order concerns, but find themselves drawn in by the temptation to comment extensively once they begin reading. The strategies that follow may be helpful in structuring your commenting practices to default to prioritized, globally-oriented feedback and support efficiency.

Begin with End Note Feedback

It’s easy to get sucked into providing detailed marginal comments as you read—comments you may well end up repeating in an end note. This can take up lots of time without paying clear dividends, particularly since it’s easy for students to miss marginal comments in the Canvas interface. To prioritize your time, aim to provide one detailed end-note comment first, then return only if needed to provide marginal comment emphasizing an example or two connected to your end-note comment.

Use Minimal Marking for Sentence-Level Concerns

If it’s important in your disciplinary context to provide sentence-level feedback, select feedback strategies appropriate to the type of error. Particularly helpful in efficient grading is the strategy of minimal marking, which involves marking spots where grammatical or other sentence-level errors have occurred without suggesting corrections. This puts the work of diagnosing and correcting errors on students rather than faculty, and has been shown to increase student learning across a variety of disciplines (e.g., journalism and business). With a carefully established checklist, you can also use a minimal marking strategy for other disciplinary writing features, as in this assignment in biology.

Set Time Goals

If you’re someone who frequently over-comments or loses track of time while grading, try setting an estimated time you’d like to spend on each paper before you begin grading. Then, set a timer as you begin each new text. It’s fine to decide to spend more time on a particular paper when the timer goes off, but keeping better track of time will help you be more intentional about how long you spend grading and commenting—and, by extension, the quantity and quality of comments you’re providing.

Take Advantage of Canvas Technologies

Recording audio or video comments, or creating a Canvas Comment Library, can speed up the process of commenting. Just remember to attend to accessibility—for students who rely on captions to parse audio, auto-generated captions will need to be corrected.

Think Holistically

If you see a repeated pattern of confusion or error across multiple students’ texts, consider giving feedback to the entire class rather than to each student individually. Even better, develop an activity, like a five-minute writing workshop, that provides targeted support for the underlying skill. And of course, don’t forget to do your future self a favor by jotting a note to make proactive assignment revisions next semester. Clarifying your requirements or developing additional scaffolding activities can help students be more successful the next time you cover that topic or assignment. We’re always happy to discuss possibilities in a consultation.

For additional strategies, check out our resources on Managing the Paper Load, or request a consultation to discuss grading and feedback practices, rubrics, or assignment design strategies that support efficient and effective feedback. We invite you to comment below to share your strategies for grading more efficiently and effectively.