I know we’ve all noticed how often students toss a paper we just handed back in the recycle bin after glancing at the grade, and only the grade. I do a lot of my grading and feedback-giving online either through Google Docs or through the StudySync platform my department is piloting, and yet I think it still ends up in the proverbial recycling bin. Students can check their grades on an assignment on Google Classroom or StudySync without opening the document at all if they want to, and many of them just use the online gradebook instead.

Despite how many students ignore my feedback, I also know that meaningful, actionable feedback, especially when revisions or redos are available, can be one of the most effective ways to differentiate instruction and help individual students grow in the areas that they need. Of course, it goes nowhere if the students don’t read it and use it.

This cardmarking, I’ve started copying what I think are my most important pieces of feedback on a given assignment into the comments in my online gradebook, along with reminders that revisions are available, and directions for what to do if students want to revise.

It’s not revolutionary. I bet many people are already doing the same thing. I know one of my coworkers mentioned the part about including directions for redos and revisions in a meeting last month, which is what inspired me to start leaving more detailed comments to begin with.

I didn’t really mention that I had changed anything. I wanted to see if they would notice on their own, because I wanted to know if they were reading my feedback independently this way.

On the first assignment of the new cardmarking, I put a couple of common comments in for my 10th graders.

• For students who didn’t turn it in, I wrote “Will be accepted late without penalty until 11/16.”
  • This date was a couple of weeks after the original due date, and truthfully, I would accept it late even after that, but I wanted them to get it done while the text was still pretty fresh in their minds.
• For students who didn’t fully meet the requirements of the prompt, I wrote “Can be revised until 11/16. See my comments in StudySync and ask me if you have questions.”
  • Again, I would actually accept revisions after that date, but I knew students would struggle to find text evidence if they waited too long after we had done the reading.

 

Of the students who did not initially submit the assignment, 11 students submitted it late without asking me what they could do to improve their grade, or what they were missing. I am pretty sure that they read that in the comment. However, only one student revised even though I suggested revisions to 7 students.

And then it dawned on me. After checking their grades in the online gradebook, they would have to go back into StudySync and click through at least 6 different pages to get to my comments. If the assignment had been in Google Classroom, it still would have been 4 or so clicks to get to my comments. What if I just put the actual comments, at least the most important ones, right in the grade book?

Here are some examples of comments I’ve been putting in for their practice assignments in the past couple of weeks:

For an assignment to practice writing claims after reading a source:

• “Strong position with a preview of reasoning.”
• “Your position is clear, but I noticed that you didn’t give a preview of your reasoning.”
• “Your position is clear and you previewed your reasoning, but did not mention the topic.”

For an assignment to practice analyzing character development in The Glass Castle:

• “Good question. What if Rex was not an alcoholic?”
• “Used the word skedaddle to analyze Rex”
• “Good tone choice. The tone reflects how Lori feels about her family.”
• “Used many details from the text”
• “No text evidence”

I can honestly type these up even faster than I can hand-write comments, and when I notice the same thing in several students’ work, I can copy and paste even more quickly.

After one week and just a couple of assignments, an 11th grader approached me out of the blue and said that he appreciated how I’m putting comments in the gradebook. We didn’t have much time to talk, so I didn’t get to dig very deeply into why he appreciated it, but he said it’s helping him and that makes me feel pretty good about taking a few extra seconds to type in or copy and paste a detailed comment. I will definitely include a question about this on my end of the semester survey to try to learn more.

I plan to continue to track how many students are taking advantage of revision opportunities, and see how or if that changes with the inclusion of more detailed comments. I’m also planning on having students use the comments in the gradebook to evaluate their own progress toward our standards twice this cardmarking, first for progress reports in a couple of weeks, and then again for report cards in January.

My next step, maybe for next semester, is to move away from putting in a grade for practice assignments entirely and replace those grades with descriptive feedback. I’m really excited about the possibilities this opens up, and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before!