For high school students, receiving a grade for an essay once meant getting handed back a paper marked with red pen, with each correction serving as a guide for how to improve. Today, it looks more like seeing a singular letter on StudentVue that offers no advice on how to get to the next level.
With most assignments and essays being graded solely by a marked rubric, students feel like they lack the personalized feedback needed to improve their skills and writing. In a system where students are expected to learn from their mistakes, many feel like they aren’t even being shown what those mistakes are.
According to English teacher Sarah Payne, some of these limits on feedback can come from policies outside of Madison. For example, in AP Seminar: English 10, teachers are restricted by College Board guidelines when it comes to giving students individualized comments on their main assignments in the course.
“Once we start the performance tasks, teachers can guide students but cannot [according to College Board] ‘provide specific, directive feedback to individuals or groups,” Payne said.
While these rules are designed to make the AP course consistent and fair across different teachers and schools, there are still ways for teachers to attempt to communicate errors to their students.
“I’m sure we may feel limited in giving feedback once we get to the performance tasks, but we will be able to [according to College Board] ‘engage in whole class teaching of the skills pertinent to the performance tasks,’” Payne said. “Our hope is that the lessons would serve as a catch for misunderstandings and allow for students to expand or deepen their writing.”
Even with teachers trying their best to work around the guidelines, students are still missing out on direct and personalized feedback that can help them understand why their work was incorrect. Corrections presented to the whole class can help address general trends in writing mistakes, but they can fail to help students find their specific weaknesses, leaving many confused and still struggling with skills by the time their final grades are released.
Issues with personalized guidance aren’t only unique to English courses. In foreign language classes, students not only struggle with what feedback teachers give, but when they decide to give it, which can be especially challenging due to the style of the course.
Typically, students complete a formative essay assignment before they write a summative assignment on a similar prompt. The idea of this system is that the feedback students receive from the first attempt can help prepare them for the second attempt, which has a higher impact on their grade. But recently, students have reported that the feedback they receive is arriving later than usual.
“In previous years, my teachers have returned my French writing assignments in one or two classes,” French student Caroline Burns (’28) said. “This year, I have yet to receive my writing formative, which we took about a month ago.”
But even when essays are returned, the timing of it can make improvement difficult.
“I feel like the feedback I get could be helpful, but with formative writing assignments, we typically don’t get them back until the day of the summative or the class before, which makes it really hard for us to put the corrections into practice,” Burns said.
The growing limits on feedback, increased by both external guidelines and the pace of a course, leave students unable to properly learn from their mistakes and apply their new knowledge. While rubrics and whole-class lessons can give general expectations, they can’t match the impact of clear and individualized comments that show students where they went wrong and how to fix it. As grading systems at Madison continue to evolve, it’s important for teachers and their superiors to find a balance between fairness, consistency and clear communication in order for students to truly improve their writing and learning skills.
