BRIDGEWATER COLLEGE WRITING CENTER


FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT OF STUDENT WRITING

Summative Assessment vs. Formative Assessment
 When assessing student writing, you have a choice between commenting on what students have done well, what poorly, and assigning a grade-summative assessment-or commenting in ways that elicit revision from students-formative assessment. If your goal is to critique and explain to students the reason for the grade assigned, then summative assessment is called for. To engage students in further consideration of their topic and the ways in which they've addressed it, you'll want to encourage them to revisit the paper-or revise it-and formative assessment assists them in doing so.

Most of us have received a fair amount of summative assessment of our own writing in academic situations, and much of our professional life is given to critical reasoning about texts, so we've learned the genre of critical commentary. It thus requires sustained conscious effort to retool our comments in order to engage students in rethinking their writing.

Why Make Formative Assessments?

1. We've all watched our students turn to the end of a paper or test that we've just returned in order to look at the grade and then put the paper or test away. Research shows that few students read faculty's critical commentary when the grade's been assigned and cannot be changed. Many papers go more or less directly into "the circular file"-the trash container in the classroom, the hallway, or the dorm room. This suggests that much of the function of such critical commentary is undertaken primarily to justify a grade, and much of it thus just shows up students' shortcomings. We would find reading such comments on our own writing painful, and it isn't difficult to understand why so frequently students don't take time to reflect on these comments.

Formative assessment gives students a reason to read and understand the instructor's comments on their writing.

2. Some faculty comment extensively on student writing in order to provide instruction in writing, in hopes that students will apply their comments to the next writing assignment. Unfortunately, unless the next assigned writing task is nearly identical, students will find it difficult to extrapolate much useful information to apply. Even success in one kind of writing task does not carry over to very different writing tasks. One student strategy for coping with this difficulty is to focus on simple "rules" they've derived inductively, like "So-and-so doesn't like sentences that start with There so I'll be sure to take all my There is sentences out of my papers."

Formative assessment aids students in applying the instructor's comments to the same or a very similar writing assignment, thus aiding them to become better writers.

3. Many students write their papers as close as possible to the due date. (Many faculty did the same as undergraduate and graduate students and may still write reports, conference papers, and articles under similar deadline duress.) Time pressure tends to produce poor reasoning and writing in all but the very best writers.

Formative assessment builds more time into the students' schedules for thinking and writing about assigned topics and results in better thinking and writing.

4. Students often believe that faculty's assessments and expectations are too harsh, unrealistic, or idiosyncratic (hence faculty's tendency to make comments that justify a grade on a paper). Careful revisiting of a paper enables them to become better evaluators of their own thinking and writing. Some students who've had formative assessment early in the term and have been required to work through revising tasks report hearing an internalized instructor voice that requests more evidence or better transition when they draft papers later in the term. This kind of response means that they've internalized some standards of academic writing that they can indeed apply to new writing situations, because they've learned something about critically evaluating their own writing practices.

Formative assessment helps students become better critics of their own writing, hence better revisers of their own writing.

How to Make Formative Assessments

1. Respond as a "real" reader of a text rather than as a teacherly authority controlling a student's text. Comment on what interests you, what you question, what you want to see more information about, etc.

2. Make as many positive comments as you can about what you see in the student's text. If he's going to read all your comments, he needs to know not all of them will make him cringe and feel stupid.

3. Be specific in your positive comments. A marginal "Good!" can be rewarding to the student, but she needs to know what's good-her point, her evidence, the connection she's making with her thesis, her wording, etc.

4. Ask questions in the margin to elicit amplification, reorganization, sharper focus, transitional wording, etc.

5. Make suggestions that encourage global (whole-text) revision in addition to local (word or sentence-level or punctuation) revision. For example, look at clarity and placement of thesis, or ask whether a statement buried in the next-to-last paragraph isn't the real thesis of the paper, or ask a student to outline her paper in order to think about its organization or ask a question such as, "Should this idea be included in paragraph 2 rather than coming at this point in your paper?"

6. Comment in general terms rather than editing a student's writing (e.g., "This is possessive and needs an apostrophe." Successive instances in the same paper might be marked just "possessive" or noted with a marginal checkmark), leaving some of the editing work for the student while giving sufficient explanation for the student to understand what's wrong. You may wish to reference handbook sections, encouraging students to develop better understanding of the principle involved.

7. Avoid ad hominem negative comments (e.g., "You must have suffered brain damage if you believe this").

8. When suggesting changes in diction, suggest at least two alternative ways of wording the same phrase or sentence to help students open up their sense of options in writing. (This is of course much more difficult than simply marking "awkward" in the margin.)

By A. L. Trupe July 6, 2001