Many teachers have been dinged for providing only discouraging feedback remarks on student essays making students feel like they are not good writers.
Teachers need to provide 50% positive comments and 50% areas of improvement comments. One famous method used for student feedback is the sandwich method.
First provide positive comments such as, John, you wrote a fantastic thesis statement that clearly states the main idea of your essay. However, your topic sentences need to better match your thesis. You need a comma after your dependent clauses. I am so proud you have made such great progress since your last essay.
Here I provided one positive statement, then 2 areas of improvement, followed by another positive statement. In this way, students know what they did right, how they improved since last time, and what areas of improvement they still need to do to get a better grade.
Sometimes when I get a low grade essay, I must admit there have been times when I had a hard time coming up with a positive comment for an essay that has too many errors or incomplete sentences or if I receive an essay for which I cannot figure out the main idea, but I come up with that positive comment anyway. We are all human. Nobody wants a totally negative evaluation. We all need some positive comments just for making the effort.
When we over grade and correct every single mistake and we try to explain why to every single mistake, we overwhelm the student.
Some teachers I know think they should correct every single grammar mistake, because after all they were hired as English writing teachers and it is their job to correct grammar errors and it is their job to correct errors, while others feel that correcting every mistake overwhelms students and takes up too much grading time. I have been in both camps in my teaching career, but I have found that when I have a heavy teaching load, that to save time, I just correct the major 2 or 3 mistakes students make.
How do you grade a student's paper?
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