Many teachers have had a favorable response to their experimentation with digital feedback on students' writing. Students much preferred a simpler system of highlighting and commenting in color. After experimentation the author found that this color-coded system was more effective for them and less time-consuming for her. Of course, any system…

Portfolio assessment has become the predominant best practice in writing assessment at the college level. Despite its clear superiority to previous methods of assessment, portfolio assessment has brought its own collection of challenges. Although the stated goal of much portfolio grading is to create an overall, or holistic, judgment of a…

Composition teachers have generally embraced collaborative learning in the years since Kenneth Bruffee published his first article promoting its advantages in "College English" in 1972. But assigning collaboratively written papers in an introductory college writing course is still rare. This study assesses the benefits and drawbacks of assigning a…

In two-year college writing classrooms and beyond, peer review is one of the most widely used tools for helping students improve their writing. Despite its widespread usage, however, it is one of the most diffuse, inconsistent, and ambiguous practices associated with writing instruction. This essay aims to explore the widely varying terminology…

This case study examines written peer response materials generated by small groups with varying gender compositions. Based on those observations, the author offers several pedagogical implications. She suggests that groups' gender make-up often does influence written feedback provided by group members during peer response sessions. By better…

This article explores the use of scoring rubrics in the context of deteriorating material conditions of writing instruction. The author hopes to offer a consideration of rubrics that enables a revision of rubric designs, in order to facilitate teacher response to student writing, and that offers suggestions for uses of rubrics that account for…

Recognizing that students shudder at revision and see it as a perfunctory task to satisfy only their teachers, the author offers an approach that motivates students to revise thoughtfully without increasing teachers' reading workload. Quite simply, good writing requires less time to read than poor writing. The Numbers Approach to grading can free…