Can you get students to read your comments?

My handwritten comments are apparently illegible to many of my students, so I’m often asked to read them (and I offer to do this in any case), in which case I learn that at least some of them are “reading” them. But as to “making them” read comments, I’m not inclined to go that far if only because I suspect that if they lack sufficient motivation in the first instance to read them sans compulsion or coercion, “making” them read them will not change anything (of course I could be wrong about that). I suspect this is of a piece with my sense that the enormous pressure of late put on teachers with regard to responsibility for “student success” is misguided and misplaced (at least at my institution), tending to ignore or downplay the many variables outside the classroom that need to be addressed in a concerted and systematic manner which serve to undermine our arduous and best efforts to help our students become sufficiently motivated to acquire a passion for learning, a thirst for knowledge, a desire for genuine self-direction and moral autonomy.

“The comment could just be: “ok”. I simply want a mechanism for making them read the comments. Has anyone else done this? Or does anyone have some reliable mechanism for making them read comments?”

I guess you’re in a position of authority in the relationship to be able to enact that – but I imagine you might suffer some consequences – some students might take the opportunity to comment back at your comment, to which you could comment back to their comment, and so forth. You’d need to make some sort of explicit limit if you did this.

Class wiki. Assignments are submitted there and you can see who last edits the page.

I also add comments but this is part of the marking process and done mostly for my benefit – I comment as I go through and then re-read looking at the comments and then score so not all that concerned whether they get read by anyone else or not although I do get occasional feedback that the comments are useful.

I use Turnitin which has a component called GradeMark. Marking in GradeMark means marking up the paper similar to Word. The difference is that I can check whether they have opened the graded version of the paper. In terms of having them read the feedback this is only really useful in the appeals process as I can compel them to address the comments of the marker in order to establish grounds for appeal. It is possible to see stats for the whole class on how many have viewed the comments.
Another way is to have a two-part assessment, where the second part of the assessment is an extension of the first part but it tends to put high demands on markers.

Current graduate student here. I read my comments and I think that the large majority of students do as well. Something like making them respond I think would breed resentment and by turning their reading of comments into an assignment actually make them less likely to think deeply about them. The students who weren’t going to read the comments are just going to write “ok” for everything anyway. Unless you think their responses will be extremely useful for you, I don’t think mandatory comments will do much but annoy them.

Harry, I can only say that I am greatly interested in what you decide to do (whether go with the policy you suggest in the OP or something else) and how it works. I spend a great deal of time myself making comments using track changes/comments, have found that a small minority of students greatly appreciate it, and I am quite in the dark as to whether the rest read them (though I strongly suspect many don’t). I am very interested in hearing more about effective ways to get students to pay more attention (because, of course, my comments are immensely helpful to anyone who may read them! ).

Interestingly, I found that when I switched to using track changes/comments to do my comments a few years ago, it actually ended up being quicker. Initially, it was slower. But I began using it for so many other things that it became second nature and, eventually, just became the sensible alternative to responding to student work as well.

I’m also interested in the wiki idea. Anyone else find this helpful? Personally, I worry that wikis become too convoluted with too many contributors. At least with track changes it’s just between the student and professor.

I dare you to make them publish everything on github.

In all my courses each writing assignment is a stage in the construction of their final paper. So in a course on regional development they have to prepare case studies. The first paper is historical context, the second is state policies, the third is citizen (re)action and the final brings all these together as an integrated second draft with conclusions and reflections on what should be done to do a better job of regional development. So they have to address the comments (which are extensive) because I tell them bluntly that if they just mush together essentially unedited first drafts I will fail them. I use this strategy in topical courses such as this, research methods, and project design, it works in all of them as I see pretty substantial improvement as it the semester moves forward. And it results in papers that I can recommend to students in future classes (well when I see new students essentially hitting on the same topic as past ones I encourage them to get in touch).

The very best technique is to not write comments on the paper but deliver them orally to each student individually. That also helps make the comments not sound so “cold and uncaring.” But, of course, that requires too much time if you have more than a handful of students. I did it when I had four enrolled in a class. The other thing is to give them a revise and resubmit option. It doesn’t guarantee that they read your comments but, as Derek says, it gives them an incentive.

There’s a fair bit of research out there that when comments are given out along with grades, most students don’t even look at the comments, and they have essentially zero pedagogical worth. Comments alone work much better though, so it might be something as simple as doing your process as you normally would (i.e. read, write comments, and grade) but only give them the essays back with the comments – and follow up with the grade a week or so later (or allow revisions if you want).

Ungraded assignments. Amazing how seriously students take them. Not some panacea. Just a part of the whole to think about.

Me too! Some students read the comments now, and for the ones who don’t you’re just making more work for both parties and no-one benefits.

I was one of those students who was passionate about some subjects and “known to the lecturer” (like “known to the police”, but with more guilt), but other subjects I did the minimum and once an assignment was done all I cared about was whether I’d got enough marks to avoid failing. Compulsory subjects in areas I actively want to avoid suck.

Also, Word? Really? There’s no better tool for what you do?

as for ZM, DNFTT

A lot of UK universities now share what looks like a mammoth hosted Turnitin implementation that provides for marking and comments. Sadly, it’s in the top three ugly websites I’ve ever seen, especially when used on a machine with a small screen. I keep meaning to look into making a greasemonkey script or similar to render it less godawful.

So I’m teaching undergrads after a long hiatus. And for my sins they are freshmen.

Being humorous, I’ve had some success with cryptic comments. At least when you hear “I don’t understand this comment” – you know they read it and you have the chance to start a dialogue.

More seriously, I have to say that requiring students to read the comments in a mechanical fashion sounds self-defeating. Students are busy and if you make something a mechanical task then any who weren’t inclined to read the comments anyway will treat it as one more hoop to jump through.

It seems to me that an actual revise and resubmit process is more meaningful, but I struggle with that because given the content I’m supposed to cover (and the way class time is arranged) it would mean sacrificing content – and I’m not officially supposed to rewrite the course that way, at least this term…

I’ve settled on a voluntary process for one of the big papers, I’ll read drafts and make and discuss comments, if students submit a draft and book an appointment…

My experience being much like BJN’s @12, I find the entire premise of the thread dubious and, frankly, a bit insulting to your students. What, specifically, is the evidence that students don’t read comments in the first place?

One solution would simply be to consider: are they making the same mistake more than once? If you get a student who, I don’t know, uses an obsolete source in an essay, you write a little note in the margin that says “Prof. Shuttleworth’s book was influential in its time, but his main thesis has been disproved by Dr. Clutterwick’s later research; probably best to avoid quoting Shuttleworth, or if you do, refer to Clutterwick’s work as well”. And if then the next week he quotes Shuttleworth again, then you can be fairly sure that he’s not reading your comments.
Same way you do any other sort of assessment of learning, really: you teach them to do something, and then you watch and see if they’re doing it right. “Always put the safety cover in place before you turn the drill on.” (watches) “OK, Suzanne, you didn’t put the safety cover in place. Make sure you do that next time.”

If, on the other hand, you’re less interested in making sure that their understanding improves, and more interested in making sure that they’re trained up for a work environment in which their behaviour will be constantly surveilled and they’ll be made to jump through a lot of infuriating hoops by management in order to fit some sort of model of the Ideal Employee… then, yes, compulsory checking of comment reading is definitely the way to go.

A couple of things:

comments are great, but focused feedback is better. So limit your comments to the three most important things the students that the students must change to make their paper better. Commenting on everything from grammar, to argument, through the lit review and evidence can be confusing for the student and time consuming for you. So with each assignment pick the three things you want them to work on and just comment on that. (you could pick five things or just one thing, it doesn’t matter.)

You should be using a grading rubric for grading assignments. There is a nice argument for why you should use them and how to use them in Ambrose, et al. _How Learning Works: Seven Principles for effective learning._ (2010). The same book also has a couple of examples of rubrics in the appendix. If you don’t want to buy the book, talk to the nice people who teach freshman composition in your English Department. Rubrics are great because they streamline your grading, make you, the instructor, give focused feedback and gives the students a goal for their revisions. The catch is that you need to hand out the rubric with your assignment sheet.

Finally, Adam Kotsko is right. Offering rewrites will give the students a terrific incentive to read your comments. Again, the rubric will cut down on the workload (you only have to grade the specific things you asked them to fix). Besides not all the students will want to take you up on the offer of an optional rewrite, even if it is for a higher grade.

My complaint as a student always was that I rarely got comments or feedback from profs, and that many profs don’t care to actually evaluate student work. I have seen massive grade inflation and students writing complete nonsense and never being corrected by their instructor. It is fairly common for students to take away that as long as you write something, you have fulfilled the assignment. It is also well known that the grading of the GRE writing assignment is strongly correlated with the number of words written.

These observations may not apply to all departments and certainly not all instructors but they are very common. A consequence is that students educated in such an environment can’t handle actual critical evaluation. Which btw is also true for many of their profs, sadly.

(I have a comment in the moderation queue)

Echoing some of the comments above.

I like using a grading ruberic and make that available along with a sample “A” paper to give an idea of what types of formatting and approaches make for good communication – particularly for younger students they rarely have a clue that having things like section headers, bulleted lists, data tables…(obviously depends on type of paper)…make a work look more professional above and beyond content.

I type my comments on a separate sheet, not embedded in the document – sometimes that leads to extra referencing, but I think it encourages looking at the comments.

For B&C papers I allow a rewrite that can award up to 5 points for addressing the deficiencies – the UP TO portion is stressed though. Getting enough to earn the higher grade will require some effort. Lower than “C” or non/pass papers require a conference. No one ever rewrites an “A” so its hardest to tell actually if any of these comments are taken to heart.

I have no reason to believe they don’t read comments. I would just like to KNOW whether they do

Change the location of your next class. Inform the students only by writing the new location in red pen in the margin of their essays. Observe who turns up where…

More seriously, the rewrite idea sounds good, but it does have the effect of reducing the amount of ground you can cover (because they’ll spend a lot of time rewriting essay x instead of writing essay x+1, as you will reading them). Maybe just do that on the first few essays, rather than all of them?

@49
For a 5-7 page paper exploring a topic or delivering a view-point with citations, the basic – show me you can research, show me you can think, show me you are literate paper, it allows some reemphasis on whichever of those three “show mes” fell short. At some length of paper or level of coursework a rewrite doesn’t serve the right purpose.

Your comments suggest masters level work – I’d expect all those 3 show mes as a given, so at that level of paper I’d fully agree, any serious deficiencies need to be addressed differently.

Faustusnotes@45
“i should probably say, a lot of Asian students come to a Masters degree (in my experience) with a very different understanding of how to construct a logical argument, and track changes + comments makes it very easy to explain to them how to do it in a “western” (for want of a better adjective) style. I think it’s more immediate than written comments. But I can’t say why.”
As was mentioned in the “is law an undergraduate degree” thread jack, for an MA you can pretty easily switch general disciplines. I found moving from a narrative based and more strictly analytical (ie. not explicitly normative) style of writing – where you had fairly free choice as to what primary sources to use for close reading etc- in the humanities, to an explicitly normative discipline, which was multidisciplinary but where professors (sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) mostly preferred quantitative analytical methods ( by the way – why is game theory not just considered argument by allegory?) and a “report” style presentation method (sometimes meant to be persuasive in the style of an editorial/advertorial type thingamajig), exceedingly frustrating to say the very least.

Faustusnotes ask, about lack of motivation for first year students, “But that’s not something you can change, is it?”

Of course you can. Like many of the commenters here, you seem to assume that for any given group of students it’s simply a given fact that some of them care and others don’t. But that’s just not true. Most college students are enrolled for a reason, and most of them intend to put forth an effort and to learn something. However, weakness of will, frustration, distraction, etc can get in the way of that. It’s not your job to hand-hold your students in doing their work, but there are ways of arranging your classes that make it more or less likely that students will be engaged and follow through on assignments.

I like the general idea of requiring responses to comments, but what you (Harry in OP) are proposing sounds too much like a chore and an obvious “I want to check whether you’re reading my comments” policy to me — to me that sounds somewhat insulting to students.
One of the things that I (and assume countless others) do to check whether students do required readings is to require them to send or post a couple of sentences of comments and/or questions. But I don’t _just_ use that to check on them, I also use them to structure class to varying degrees.

Why not do the same for comments? Require them to give _you_ feedback on your comments, something like “write a short paragraph on which comment(s) you found most helpful and why”. That will require them to read the comments and I imagine it could actually be interesting for you to skim their comments, but you don’t have to – you can just give them x-amount of credits for handing/sending it in.

Has anyone tried Substance McGravitas’s suggestion of a class wiki? I don’t teach so I can’t try it but whenever the issue of commenting on student papers (and related issues) comes up, I make the same suggestion. Other than a poet or two who used it for shared class projects on specific poetic styles/techniques (quite successfully, I think), instructors tend to say “Oh, the kids will never get a wiki.” or “That’s too public.” or some other lame excuse. It seems like a perfectly reasonable suggestion to me and if I was running a class and I wanted focus on interacting with student writing, I’d set a wiki or three.

@22: “There’s a fair bit of research out there that when comments are given out along with grades, most students don’t even look at the comments, and they have essentially zero pedagogical worth.”

Could you point us to an example of this research? You very likely are correct, but I find this result dramatically contrary to my experience & expectation. For the vast majority of 18 year olds — even bright, literate 18 year olds — simply trying to arrange a thousand words in a cohesive fashion requires significant effort. Even with a superb secondary education, they just haven’t had the years of practice that most folks need in order to make writing reasonably easy. Comments validate the effort that even the most trivial paper requires. Speaking only for myself, the quantity&quality of instructor comments was probably the single biggest factor determining whether I remained engaged an a course: they were more important than the dynamism of lectures, class discussion, or even my initial curiosity in the subject. My (perhaps dead wrong!) assumption would be that the vast majority of comments are read, and that pretty much the only time they’re ignored is when a student is so embarrassed/ashamed of their work that they feel unwilling to face the response.

I’ll go slightly further than ascholl @60. Such a conclusion is completely contrary to my own experience and that of virtually everyone I interacted with in university, and almost equally contrary to my limited experience teaching at a university level, much of which conformed to the worst stereotypes of unmotivated students in other important respects. This seems so wildly implausible to me that my first instinct would be to look for methodological flaws in the research; only if an exhaustive search failed to find any would I begin to consider regarding such as study as even prima facie evidence that its conclusions were actually correct.

@ ascholl & JeffH

Presenting an evaluative grade at the same time as a comment(s) is widely regarded in Ed. Research as counterproductive.

One source: Brookhart, S. M. (2008). Feedback that fits. Educational Leadership, 65(4), 54-59.

A precis:
1) Focus on work and process—effective feedback describes the students’ work, comments on the process the student used to do the work, and makes specific suggestions for what to do next. General praise (“Good job!”) or personal comments do not help.
2) Relate feedback to the goal—it needs to describe where the student is in relation to the learning goal. It helps each student decide what his or her next goal should be. Self-referenced feedback about the work itself is helpful for struggling students, who need to understand that they can make progress as much as they need to understand how far they are from the ultimate goal.
3) Try for description, not judgment ***Certain students are less likely to pay attention to descriptive feedback if it is accompanied by a formal judgment, like a grade or an evaluative comment.*** For these learners, point out improvements over their previous performance, even if those improvements don’t amount to overall success on the assignment. Then select one or two small, doable next steps. After the next round of work, give the student feedback on his or her success with those steps, and so on.
4) Be positive and specific—describe how the strengths in a students’ work match the criteria for good work and how they show what that student is learning. And it means choosing words that communicate respect for the student and the work. Your tone should indicate that you are making helpful suggestions and giving the student a chance to take the initiative.

The *** section above deals specifically with ‘certain learners” a generic term describing any number of aspects of learner motivation (one such example is found in:
Dweck, C. S. (1986). Motivational processes affecting learning. American Psychologist, 41(10), 1040-8.

Unfortunately JeffH I’m not in a position to do an exhaustive search for you to disprove the research findings. I can start you off by noting that the majority of the research in this area deals with elementary and secondary school students.

But your approach to the issue does largely conform to the research in teachers’ approach to educational research and assessment practice– largely dismissive and resistant to change. See:

Brown, S., McIntyre, D. (1978). Factors influencing teachers’ responses to curricular innovations. British Educational Research Journal, 4(1), 19-23.

Brown, S., McIntyre, D. (1982). Influences upon teachers’ attitudes to different types of innovation: A study of Scottish integrated science. Curriculum Inquiry, 12(1) 35-51

Desimone, L. (2002). How can comprehensive school reform models be successfully implemented? Review of Educational Research, 72(3), 433-79.

Doyle, W., & Ponder, G. A. (1977). The practicality ethic in teacher decision-making. Interchange, 8(3), 1-12.

Young, V. M., & Kim, D. H. (2010). Using assessments for instructional improvement: A literature review. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 18(19).

“Send an email giving students the grade, then track whether or not they actually open the attached file containing the comments–but there doesn’t seem to be a reliable way to do that.”

No, but you could send two separate emails: one containing the grade, the other the comments. Tracking email opening is fairly reliable, isn’t it?

Not really relevant, but it occurs to me my last comment on John Holbo’s thread kind of incorporates a comment on a final exam question about pragmatism (which I was too shy and public-school trained to ask for clarification on at the time), so I’ve been thinking about that one, even if it took nearly thirty years.

I apologize for being so late with the obvious comment, but wouldn’t this be an excellent marketing opportunity for Mr. O’Brien’s Buchhandlung service? Be on the alert for student comments such as “Yes, but see Adorno’s reply to Benjamin,” “reductionism is its own reward,” “more in Thoreau than in Engels,” usw. I’d be particularly suspicious, in fact, of those commenters who use “usw.”