Focused, Actionable Feedback

What students experience

Typed comments in the learning management system are the main way writing instructors respond to students. In a national survey of 235 online and hybrid writing instructors, 73% frequently used LMS tools to comment on student work, while only 12% frequently gave audio feedback and 10% video feedback (CCCC OWI Standing Group, 2021, pp. 26, 71). At OCTC, the split is similar.

In Blackboard, feedback can sit in four places: overall feedback, inline comments on the submitted file, comments on individual rubric criteria, and recordings. Each place answers a different question, and students often check only the first. The grade appears first, so a student who reads only that never opens the file where most of the specific comments are.

Three things make feedback harder for multilingual learners to use, and most of them affect every student. The same survey’s authors conclude that practices for supporting students learning English in writing courses “need continued attention” (p. 12).

• Softened requests. “You might consider adding an example” is a polite request. A student reading literally can hear it as optional. “What do you mean here?” can read as a question to answer, not a sentence to rewrite.
• Short marks. “awk,” “wc,” and “?” in the margin carry a lot of meaning for the instructor and very little for a student who has not learned the code.
• Volume. Thirty marked errors can bury the two comments about the argument, and they tell the student that grammar matters most, whether or not the rubric says so.

Recorded feedback raises its own questions. It carries tone and warmth well, and many students find it more personal. That same quality can make it harder to take in: the student hears critique in the instructor’s voice, at the instructor’s pace, with no easy way to return to one point. Some students play a recording once and do not return to it, even when they would reread typed comments. This is practitioner observation from OCTC faculty development work. Nationally, 60% of surveyed instructors give instructions or feedback to English language learners in more than one mode, and only 14% rely more on audio (CCCC OWI Standing Group, 2021, p. 36).

Seven practices

1. Tell students where to look

   Say which places you use and in what order to read them. One line with the grade does it: “Start here, then open your file for my comments.”

2. Lead with two or three priorities

   Use the overall feedback for the few changes that matter most, tied to rubric criteria. Inline comments then support those priorities instead of competing with them. Start by naming what is working. The CCCC statement asks instructors to learn strategies for “seeing and promoting the textual features that are rhetorically effective.”

3. Write requests as requests

   Keep the warmth in the opening and closing, and state each requested change directly. “Add an example to paragraph 2” is kind and clear. “You might consider an example” is kind and unclear.

4. Mark patterns, not every error

   For sentence-level issues, name the pattern, mark two or three examples, and ask the student to find the rest. Link the matching toolkit page. Match the amount of language marking to what the rubric says language is worth. For multilingual writers, the CCCC statement recommends “prioritizing two or three mechanical or stylistic issues that individual multilingual writers should focus on throughout the duration of the course.”

5. Give a key for your marks

   If you use abbreviations, put a short key in the syllabus or in the assignment. The paired student page has a common set you can adopt or edit.

6. Pair a recording with typed action items

   Use the recording for tone and overall direction, and keep it short. Add two or three typed action items in the overall feedback, so students have a list to work from. Video Studio captions and transcribes recordings automatically; check the captions for course terms and names. Captioning labor is one of the accessibility challenges instructors report most (CCCC OWI Standing Group, 2021, p. 37), and automatic captions remove most of it. Tell students about the playback speed and transcript options in the three-dot menu.

7. Close the loop

   Ask students to respond with one or two changes they plan to make, or to attach a short revision plan to the next draft. It shows you who used the feedback, and it gives students a reason to read it.

Before and after

Both versions respond to the same first draft. The second matches the example on the paired student page, with its requests stated directly.

What changed

• Praise became specific. The student knows what to keep.
• Suggestions became numbered requests, each tied to a rubric criterion.
• “Watch grammar throughout” became one pattern, with a set number of marked examples and a page to practice with.
• The last line says where the rest of the feedback is.

Wording you can copy

Replace the text in brackets.

For the syllabus: how feedback works in this course

Overall feedback template

With a recording

Link for students

The paired student page shows where each kind of feedback appears in Blackboard, gives a table of common marks, teaches students to read softened comments as requests, and walks through a revision plan. You can add this line to an assignment or an announcement:

For how much language accuracy should count, see Rubrics and where language accuracy fits.

Sources

• CCCC Online Writing Instruction Standing Group. (2021). The 2021 state of the art of OWI report (opens in a new tab). Conference on College Composition and Communication. See “Executive Summary” and “Student Experience.”
• Conference on College Composition and Communication. (2020). CCCC statement on second language writing and multilingual writers (opens in a new tab). See Part Four, “Response to Student Writing.”