ABSTRACT
Responding to student writing is time-consuming, challenging work. After an awareness of possible cultural differences, the most important thing for faculty to know about feedback is that there is no conclusive evidence that correcting students’ sentence-level errors leads students to make those errors less frequently over the long term. In considering what makes feedback valuable, it’s useful to take a step back and consider the kinds of responses faculty give. Feedback falls into roughly four categories: corrective, directive, evaluative, and facilitative. Faculty makes corrective responses by correcting spelling, punctuation, or citation errors. Conferences are a highly effective tool for responding to student writing. There is no avoiding the reality that individual conferences take 10–30 minutes per student depending on: the length of the assignment; the teacher’s experience with conferencing; and the teacher’s experience with that particular assignment.
