Effective faculty feedback: The road less traveled

Grading papers may be one of the most stressful, most time consuming, and least rewarding activities in which professors engage. Although effective grading techniques for papers have been widely researched, especially within the “Writing” or “English” scholarly arenas, has this information been put into practice? The goals of this paper are two-fold: (1) to replicate and extend Connor and Lunsford's [Connors, R. J., & Lunsford, A. A. (1993). Teachers’ rhetorical comments on student papers. College Composition and Communication, 44, 200–223] analysis of faculty comments, and (2) to review some of the tips for effective grading practices and see if the comments reflected these effective practice advice. A content analysis was conducted on faculty comments from 598 graded papers written for hundreds of courses from 30 different departments in the university. Results indicate that most comments were technical corrections that addressed spelling, grammar, word choice, and missing words. Macro- and mid-level comments that addressed paper organization and quality of the ideas contained in it were surprisingly absent. The lack of these larger idea and argument centered comments may prevent students from improving the quality of the larger issues in writing and refocus them on the smaller, albeit important, technical issues of writing.