Assessment is coaching, and coaching is assessment. Academics try to steer clear of the term coaching due to its connection to sports. But coaching is synonymous with assessment. Students want their FYC teacher to encourage them, provide very targeted constructive criticism, and convey the message of relevance and skill building.
Encouragement
Students desire to be encouraged, and I believe that instructors should actively find positives in a student’s work. Secondly, we all have read criticism of our writing that is vague and does not point to a solution. This is a source of frustration for students. They want targeted feedback that reveals exactly what is wrong in their text. It is of little use for a student to see “confusing” or “vague” on their paper without any details explaining why. Instead of "vague "or "unclear" teachers can comment about how the passage does not support their thesis, or that it does not provide concrete examples to support their argument.
Assessment should point to global writing skills
The feedback students receive should never come across as random, or unconnected to writing skills. When done correctly, assessment can develop students' skills. Instructors should remind students of the relevance of writing in their careers, whether they have declared a major or not. When explained in useful and clear terms, students can see how a teacher's assessment connects to global writing lessons like clarity, argumentation, grammar, sentence structure, and sequencing. Though local writing skills may be addressed in the assessment process, global concerns should by the primary focus.
Boston College offers samples of actual feedback provided to students through their Online Writing Lab center. Though the responses are from student writing consultants, I think they represent a model for holistic responses that focuses on global issues.
Early and often
Teachers who only give quality feedback and critique near the end of the semester are failing in their job as an instructor. Feedback should be early in the semester so students can receive the instruction and adjust their writing to improve for future assignments. We can also assume that students will not take feedback seriously if their grade is essentially calculated after submitting their final paper.
You'll get by with a little help from your students
Though some teachers may feel burdened by this seemingly endless assessment loop, they should remember to build in time for students to assess their classmates' work. The University of Nebraska's Writing Center advises, "Structuring time for peer response and group workshops can be a very effective way for students to receive feedback from other writers in the class and for them to begin to learn to revise and edit their own writing." Use your class as an assessment lab, with students being your lab workers. The task of assessment should not fall 100% on instructors.
Using examples to set students up for success
Instructors should always assess student work in a meaningful way for their students. But teachers should also explain what they are expecting well in advance of the assignment deadline. Using examples (sometimes called models) will prevent teachers from becoming overwhelmed by the assessment process; teachers have limited time, and we should try to prevent writing errors and shortcoming from occurring through instruction.
Teaching effectively prevents assessment headaches
Don't leave students guessing about what you are looking for in major projects. If you do this, you will avoid painful assessment sessions. English professor Brady Krien describes how modeling can put students on a path to effective writing:
"The best way to avoid this is to provide multiple examples of writing that meet the criteria for your assignment. This provides students with a sense of what successful completion of that assignment might look like, but also ensures that they see a range of possible approaches, so they don’t all turn in assignments that rigidly mimic a single example." (insidehighered.com 2018)
You may ask, wait ... how is this connected to assessment? It is connected because we only have a limited time to conduct quality assessments of major assignments; therefore, we need to make the most of classroom instruction so that we are not teaching an entire lesson as we assess student work.
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