My interest in antiracist writing assessment began last semester while teaching the practicum. We read Asao Inoue’s Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Inoue begins by reviewing research on how students of color fail FYC at significantly increased rates. This research clearly shows there is a structural problem plaguing developing writers, and Inoue charges the field to acknowledge and remedy this problem. His challenge has been taken up by NCTE, which has recently formed the Committee Against Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English. Below I want to highlight a few of Inoue’s core principles and advocate for one of my own strategies.
Below I highlight Inoue’s commitment to separating feedback from assessment, rewarding effort instead of measuring achievement, and familiarizing students with rubrics. I then advocate for how increasing authentic praise can help build confidence and increase FYC retention rates.
Separate Feedback and Assessment
Inoue advocates separating the act of giving feedback from the moment of assessment. This separation changes the phenomenological context in which students receive and absorb our feedback. When the two are given together–i.e., you provide extensive commentary while providing a grade–students frame the commentary as justification of the grade. The context is adversarial. The feedback isn’t received as constructive, caring help, but rather as a tick-sheet of faults and reasons why they didn’t get a C/B/A (whatever grade they are trying to achieve). However when feedback is separated from assessment, student attitudes shift, because they absorb feedback as advice (for how to improve a future assessment) rather than as a justification of an assessment.
I put this into practice last fall in ENG 122 by only commenting on rough drafts. Final drafts were simply scored according to a rubric, with absolutely no commentary. Students were invited to visit office hours to discuss any rubric evaluation they did not understand or agree with.
Reward Labor Not Achievement
A core element of Inoue’s argument is that traditional grading rubrics contribute greatly to the structural racism impinging on students of color. His argument is too expansive for me to explicate in this space, so I would ask you to accept that students most at risk for failing out of FYC are the one’s least able to understand rubric categories. This leads Inoue to advocate for his most radical change: his grading is based entirely on a grading contract that rewards labor and does not, in any way, assess quality. Effort is measured by trusting students to keep a labor journal, by the quantity of writing assignments, and by frequent reflective writing on how a project is developing.
As much as I appreciate Inoue’s argument, I couldn’t completely give up formal, abstract assessment of student work. In my ENG 123 last spring, I followed Danielewicz and Elbow (2009)’s work on grading contracts (which Inoue frames as a productive move that doesn’t go far enough to combat structural racism). 70% of the writing students did last semester was scored on a pass/fail basis–if students met word counts and simple, concrete requirements (ie-this paper must describe an article’s research methods or compare two research articles or use APA format), then they got full credit for the assignment. Only a project proposal (10%) and the final paper (20%) for the course was scored by a traditional rubric. I will follow a similar formula in my 122 and 201 courses this semester (shooting for a 75% labor, 25% achievement split).
Yes, this led to what might look like “grade inflation.” I scare quote because I don’t think the grades were inflated. I think they were earned; the quality of final papers in that class were among the best I have ever received from a first-year writing class. Students earned 16 A’s last semester, along with 4 B’s, 3 C’s, and 1 F’s. Final papers earned 11 A’s, 9 B’s, 2 C’s, 1 D, and 1 F’s. While I have no concrete data, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess those grades are way higher than my normal curve. But I think the strongest anecdotal evidence for the success of Inoue’s approach (even with my Elbowian modifications) is that No. One. Dropped. The only person who failed stopped coming for the last month and didn’t turn in a final paper. In an era concerned with retention for FYC, a labor-based assessment ecology holds promise. I’m convinced not only of its ability to keep students in our classes, but also its ability to maximize their development.
Demystify the Rubric
While Inoue challenges traditional rubric assessment, he is not opposed to rubrics. In fact, generating and applying a rubric is central to his class. In my 123 last semester, we spent every Friday alternating between grade norming sessions (in which we used my final paper rubric to evaluate and annotate papers from past semesters) and peer review sessions (using the rubric to evaluate their works-in-progress). The goal is to demystify the rubric via praxis rather than lecture. I don’t want to explain to them what it means for the conclusion of a paragraph to reconnect to a paper’s overarching argument. Rather, I want them to explain it to me via a concrete defense of why a paragraph earned a particular rubric score–a method that resonates with approaches rooted in writing-about-writing. The rubric forms the ecological hub of Inoue’s approach. Constant familiarizing exercises ideally transfer to students’ own composing.
Meaningful Feedback and Praise
While prepping for teaching the orientation last I gathered research on providing meaningful feedback. I was initially searching for two threads: work by folks like Sommers and Moxley emphasizing how students have difficulty hierarchizing instructor feedback–that is, they often can’t determine what feedback is more important (and this resonates with Inoue on multiple levels). The walkaway to this research is to provide *less* feedback–focus on issues related to the hierarchy of writing importance.
One thing that can help with providing less-but-better feedback is to follow Haswell’s “Minimal Marking”: rather than mark off grammatical errors, simply put a mark next to the sentence and dedicate 10 minutes of class time to having student remedy any sentence with a check mark. Students can fix most mistakes on their own. I do this in Google docs by simply highlighting the period of any sentence with a mistake.
While gathering this stuff, I came across Donald A. Daiker’s (1984) “Learning to Praise.” It disturbed me. Productively.
Daiker’s study surveyed 300 FYC essays. He found that 90-95% of instructor comments on a paper are negative. Wow. This trend begins in high school and carries through almost all levels of collegiate instruction. WOW. When students receive a positive comment, they are most often a generic salutation to open the longer summation at the end of an essay. “Karen, I think you offer a compelling argument against straws but let me write 750 words on what you need to do better.”
After reading Daiker, I challenged the grad students and myself to do better. We worked for a 1:2 positive to constructive ratio. It was hard! But I think we can create a more constructive relationship with students, improve retention and the phenomenological context in which they receive our feedback, if we actively work to be more positive.
