Review the pedagogical and technical information below to inform your progress in Week Six. Have questions about what you learned here or ideas for future tips? Join Coffee & Answers (open support Zoom sessions with the Academic Technology Team) or email the Office of Teaching and Learning.
Pedagogical
How do you craft a more human-centered approach to responding to student writing?
When responding to student writing, it is important to keep in mind the context for that writing. Is it an informal response in class to check knowledge? A reflection or response papers on the readings? A well-developed research paper that has gone through drafts? The more time a student has spent on a piece of writing should give you a guideline for how much time you spend responding. A quick in-class response can receive a grade or 1 or 2 points in Canvas, with perhaps a quick marginal comment: Good! Keep thinking! Or the like. A reflection paper deserves more comments and a more significant number of points or percentages in the grading scale, and a longer piece deserves a longer comment.
The most important thing you can do in your comments is to let the student know what they are doing well. Praise–do more of this, this is great–is much more effective than discouraging feedback. For more on effective feedback, see this article from the University of Notre Dame.
The challenge of responding to student writing is that you hope you are leading them to stronger writing and to revision. As researcher Nancy Sommers argues:
The challenge we face as teachers is to develop comments which will provide an inherent reason for students to revise; it is a sense of revision as discovery, as a repeated process of beginning again, as starting out new, that our students have not learned. We need to show our students how to seek, in the possibility of revision, the dissonances of discovery-to show them through our comments why new choices would positively change their texts, and thus to show them the potential for development implicit in their own writing.
The research has shown that using AI to grade student work produces unfair outcomes and may exacerbate existing inequalities between students who have privilege and those who don’t. There are a variety of other reasons not to use AI in grading..
The good news is that responding to student writing does not need to be onerous. Students can take in 2-3 points about their writing at a time, and often, unless you are returning to the writing in some way, will only focus on the grade. Harvard’s well-known “Writing Project” recommends prioritizing your responses. While you might be tempted to correct any comma splice or sentence fragment, you can spend a lot of time doing this with little benefit for either you or the student. This is for two reasons: 1) Students will rarely go back through their papers to see their errors; 2) writing tends to fall apart when students encounter new or challenging material. It is much more effective to focus on larger structural concerns when responding to student writing.
Richard Haswell, a researcher in the field of Rhetoric and Composition, advocates using minimal marking to teach sentence level errors. Minimal marking means placing an X or check mark by any sentence with an error and then asking the student to go back through the paper, correct the errors, and resubmit it.
Technical
What are the tools that help streamline the grading process?
Canvas offers flexible grading processes, but its real strengths emerge when assignments, feedback, and grading policies are set up intentionally. With a few key tools, instructors can grade more efficiently while providing clearer guidance to students.
Most grading happens in SpeedGrader, where instructors can review submissions, assign scores, and leave feedback in one place. SpeedGrader works with all major submission types and integrates seamlessly with rubrics, which help ensure consistency and transparency. When rubrics are used, Canvas can automatically calculate scores, reducing manual errors and saving time—especially in large courses. Instructors can also choose whether grades are posted automatically or held until all submissions are reviewed.
Canvas supports multiple forms of feedback, including written comments, inline annotations, and audio or video responses. Many instructors find that brief recorded feedback feels more personal to students and takes less time than extensive written notes. Because feedback appears in several locations, it’s helpful to show students early on where and how to review it.
If your Syllabus breaks down grades that are weighted between different categories, it’s important to set up those weights in Canvas as well. Weighted grades are managed through Assignment Groups. Ensuring assignments are grouped correctly and weights total 100% is essential for accurate grade reporting.
With thoughtful setup, Canvas can make grading clearer, faster, and more transparent for everyone.
Please join any Coffee & Answers open support session for a live demonstration of any of these tools!
Are these tips helpful? Do you have a topic we should include in future weeks? Please let us know by emailing otl@sju.edu!
Additional Resources