What this resource is about: 

This resource is about using a common feedback approach when responding to student writing in an undergraduate environmental engineering course. 

What is common feedback?  

Common feedback refers to a way of generating writing feedback for a specific assignment or class and compiling it into one document. The feedback is generalized to avoid pinpointing specific students and to provide broad takeaways for all students. The feedback document is provided to students or given to teaching assistants and graders to help them provide comments on written assignments. Instructors can elaborate on their comments by including specific examples of how to improve writing in the context of the assignment/report, making the feedback relevant and applicable to the students, which can help students better understand the application of a general rule.  

Reflection from Dr. Lauchnor:  

The first year that I used common feedback, it took some time to write up the comments, but it did help me to consider what kind of feedback I wanted to give the students in a holistic sense.  It felt more consistent for the students and like a more organized way to determine what they should collectively learn from my feedback.   

The second year that I used it, the method saved me a marginal amount of time as I was more efficient at reviewing drafts.  My corrections from the previous year helped me to find issues and suggest improvements more quickly.  I was able to reuse most of my comments from the previous year and improve a few of them.  While it was a fair bit of work to generate the feedback initially, it is certainly helping me to become better at giving feedback and improve my comments year after year. 

My hope is that this common feedback helps students to be more open with each other in their writing assignments.  Reading my feedback to everyone may increase confidence in their abilities when they notice similar errors are common among their peers.  I hope this can be an example of students learning from each other through my comments and understanding more about why we make certain corrections in their work. 

Benefits: 

Providing feedback to students on their writing can be incredibly time-consuming, particularly for large classes.  Providing one resource with compiled feedback for student drafts can save time and show students that many of their “errors” are common and part of the writing and learning process.  Providing all feedback to the entire class helps them see suggestions that they wouldn’t have necessarily received on their individual papers.  It can also help to facilitate a classroom environment where students are more receptive to discussing their writing with each other, as they read and use the common feedback to improve their final submissions.  

When a writing assignment has been given in the past, or an instructor has some way of anticipating common issues with students’ writing, the common feedback document could be provided with the assignment. The students could then use the guidance when writing their draft. 

The guidance document can be used by teaching assistants or graders who provide feedback to students on their writing.  In this way, it can serve as a training tool to help graduate students understand how to teach students about writing in their discipline. 

Challenges:  

Inevitably, students won’t always use the feedback or read it, particularly when they are not participating in studios for the class.  An instructor can encourage them to use the feedback by spending time on it in class or indicating in their papers when a comment applies to them.  Both options require time and effort, so this means that the approach may not turn out to be more efficient in the end.  However, I do think the quality and relevance of the feedback can be high when taking this approach, particularly when using comments that I’ve written for a previous class and improving on them. 

It takes time. Both in creating the feedback document and in class to go over the comments together. Dedicating time in class helps communicate the importance of the feedback.  It helps students understand that they should go through those comments in addition to the specific comments in their papers. My students also had the advantage of participating in small groups with the Writing Center where they could review the comments, which was helpful.  

How to get started: 

When reading student writing, make a list of corrections that are common to more than one student.  If an assignment has been given before, you may anticipate certain common errors or keep track of how many students have made a specific error. The common feedback should be a total of one page addressing the most important issues without overwhelming students. 

    • Avoid providing examples that use specific writing from your students. Instead, make up your own examples that present the same issue, and your own good examples.  Students who are new to this approach may feel offended or targeted if any of their exact writing is used in feedback distributed to everyone, but they should be able to make the connection between your examples and their mistakes. 
    • To help students see where they need to follow your feedback, number comments in the common feedback list, then cite those numbers in specific locations of the students’ writing, or use highlights to color code your comments and indicate where they apply in a student’s writing. 
  • Add comments to address anticipated errors or errors you have seen in the past.   
  • Post the common feedback at the same time you return drafts to the students.
    •   Review some of the comments in class.  Point out a few that many students need to correct, or a few that were issues last year. 
  • Reuse the feedback that you generate. Not only is common feedback a resource for the students, but one for you to keep track of common mistakes.  By continually improving the feedback document, you will save time in future courses. 
  • Finally, still provide specific comments to each student, so they know you are reviewing their work.  Limit time on this feedback by only giving each student one or two comments per page. 
     

Examples of feedback: 

  • Use technical words and be as specific as possible.  It is easy to add a fluff sentence like "it's very important to understand water quality in a stream", but it doesn't add value to the report and it's just repeating the report's purpose that has already been established.  Re-read your reports to make sure you avoid these fluffy sentences that add text for readers to wade through without much value.   
     
  • Avoid attaching subjective, qualitative terms to results, such as "the water quality results look promising/good/bad".  Only report the quantitative aspects of the results.  This DOESN’T mean that you can't comment on the water quality, only that you need to use data and comparisons to ecosystem/health requirements (and cite sources). 
     
  • Avoid making general, comparative judgements that are too vague to convey information, such as "the water upstream is cleaner than downstream".  Instead, could say "nitrogen increases from upstream to downstream locations". 
     
  • Yes, I sometimes comment on just ONE WORD in your report.  The words that you use can have very specific meaning in a technical sense, imply tone or attitude, or suggest some kind of positive/negative connotation that is not intended (or shouldn’t be present).  It’s really important to pay attention to the words that you use. 
     
  • Spell out numbers that are less than 10 when discussing things like numbers of samples or locations. When presenting data such as concentrations, temperature, pH, etc. use the numeric value. 
     
  • Chemicals are not proper nouns, they should not be capitalized. 
     
  • All figures and tables need to be cited in the text.  You need to provide sources for any photos/figures that are not your own.