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ILA: Evaluating Student Writing
"The writing teacher's ministry is not just to the words but to the
person who wrote the words," William Zinsser (Writing to Learn).
Ongoing research is showing that evaluation of
student writing, across the disciplines, is most effective when
students are aware of and part of the evaluation process.
Evaluating writing offers us a chance to converse with student
writers not only about their writing skills but also about their
ideas and grasp of course content.
Evaluating a student's ideas, and writing, can be
made simpler and less stressful by following a few key principles:
 | Evaluation = grading + commenting. |
| Effective evaluation begins with
well-designed assignments:
clear objectives on an assignment sheet become clear criteria
for evaluating an essay. |
| One single, "correct" approach to evaluating
student writing does not exist. There are many possible
ways to comment on student writing: intentionally construct an
evaluation strategy with your own purpose, goals, criteria, and
students' needs in mind. |
| Remind students that writing is never
complete, it just hits a deadline. Then it's
evaluated--based on what they were able to do with it before the
deadline arrived. They can still use your evaluative
feedback on their next piece of writing. |
The following handouts will help you to design an
effective evaluation strategy. I'm happy to talk with you or
examine drafts of any of your materials.
Other evaluation strategies that you might want to
examine and try include:
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Generic Standards for Evaluating Student
Writing: The following grade-level descriptions of content,
development, sentence structure, and diction/mechanics can be
adapted to your own course and assignment.
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Sample Response Sheet:
This modified rubric, with places for comments, can be adapted
to your own course and assignment.
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Sample Score Sheet:
Another modified rubric, which can be adapted to your own course
and assignment.
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An ENGL 110 Experiment: In an attempt to
encourage my ENGL 110 students to use more actively my comments
on their essays, we experimented with extended comments last
spring. This particular section liked the developed
comments and minimally-marked essays. (For examples of the
minimally-marked essays, please contact Steve Price.)
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