Week Five: Effective Feedback in Digital Spaces
One of the most vital, and most difficult, ways to both develop instructor presence and support student writers is through clear, timely feedback on student writing. |
One of the most rewarding and stressful points in any class is when the first assignment is submitted and you can see if students REALLY understood what you asked them to do. If they did, the moment is incredibly rewarding. If they did not, you might feel myriad feelings...including despair.
In online classes, we don't always have immediate, face-to-face contact with students, so feedback is not just a means to identify whether or not a student has met assignment outcomes. Feedback also develops relationship, builds trust and confidence, and is a way for the faculty member to demonstrate that s/he cares about the students' learning experience. In essence, the assignment/feedback/revision cycle that Hewett outlines on page 63 is, in many ways, the heart of the student-intructor relationship--where much of the "learning" happens online. This week, we will provide feedback on some student essays and then discuss the experience of providing that feedback. In addition, we will consider the multiple ways that feedback can be delivered and received, both in terms of media and in terms of student and faculty experience. |
5.1 Activity: Providing Online Feedback
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Before we talk about providing feedback on student writing online, we are going to provide some feedback to real students. These papers were written for a section of my RHET 1312 class some years ago. Student names have been removed from the texts.
The learning outcomes in this course are the WPA learning outcomes that you used to create your unit in Week Two. So keep those outcomes in mind when you are providing feedback: your goal is to move student toward proficiency in those four major areas. The syllabus and schedule for these writing projects can help you see the environment of the class that produced these texts and the activities that lead up to these texts (Note: Unfortunately, this class was a face-to-face class instead of an online class. But the assignments I give online are very similar. For this activity, you will read four student essays and respond to two of those essays. The essays and the assignment sheets for those essays are posted below. All of these essays are second drafts of the assignment, which means that this feedback will be FORMATIVE (i.e., used for students to revise) and not SUMMATIVE (i.e., used only for assessing the work or assigning a grade). Assignment One --- Essay One: Student One --- Essay One: Student Two Assignment Two --- Essay Two: Student One --- Essay Two: Student Two To complete this activity:
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5.2 Discussion Board: Responding to Feedback
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For the discussion this week, I would like you to 1) talk about your experiences in providing feedback and also 2) comment on the feedback that other students have provided.
You can provide specific feedback on comments that your classmates have provided by replying to those comments directly in the Google Docs. You can also discuss more global issues and concerns related to providing feedback to online writing students in the threaded discussion posts. In particular, identify ways that your colleagues have given comments that demonstrate effective practices in online writing feedback identified by Beth Hewett in Chapter 13 (and using language that is coherent, straight-forward, with linguistic and semantic integrity from Chapter 12). |