Assessing and providing feedback for student writing in Canadian classrooms

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

Assessing Writing 15 (2010) 86–99

Assessing and providing feedback for student writing in Canadian classrooms Shelley Stagg Peterson a,∗ , Jill McClay b,1 a

Department of CTL, OISE/University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1V6 b Department of Elementary Education, 551 Education South, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2G5 Received 4 February 2010; received in revised form 5 May 2010; accepted 18 May 2010 Available online 9 June 2010

Abstract This paper reports on the feedback and assessment practices of Canadian grades 4–8 teachers; the data are drawn from a national study of the teaching of writing at the middle grades in all ten Canadian provinces and two (of three) territories. Respondents were 216 grades 4–8 teachers from rural and urban schools. Data sources were audio-recorded telephone interviews analyzed using a constant comparative method. Participating teachers were mindful that feedback is important for student self-esteem; they valued peer editing and viewed feedback as essential for fostering students’ writing development; they strove to be what they considered “objective” while adhering to criteria for standardized exams. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Writing assessment practices; Written feedback; Oral feedback; Young adolescents; Canada

In this article, we report findings from a national study of the assessment and feedback practices of grades 4–8 teachers across the ten Canadian provinces and two of three territories. Drawing on interviews with 216 teachers, our research addresses the question: How do Canadian teachers in grades 4–8 assess and provide feedback to students on their writing? Prior to our current study, the only national data on classroom writing practices in Canada came from an analysis of teachers’ responses to a questionnaire component of the national writing test, the 2002 School Achievement Indicators Program (SAIP), for 13- and 16-year olds (Hunter, Mayenga, & Gambell, 2006). In their analysis, researchers found that 58% of the 4070 secondary teachers who completed the questionnaire provided written feedback on students’ assignments and ∗ 1

Corresponding author. Tel.: +1 416 978 0329. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (S.S. Peterson), [email protected] (J. McClay). Tel.: +1 780 492 0968.

1075-2935/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.asw.2010.05.003

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that 35% of teachers reviewed models of good writing with high frequency. Teachers used essays, open response tests and short answer quizzes to assess writing. Over half of participating teachers discussed with their students the criteria for assessing written assignments. Our study provides a more comprehensive picture of teachers’ writing assessment and feedback to students, contributing to an understanding of opportunities and challenges for teachers in using feedback and assessment to foster their students’ writing development and their positive views of themselves as writers. 1. Theoretical framework Assessing writing and providing feedback to students are social practices; these practices are influenced by teachers’ views of what constitutes good writing and good teaching practice within both their local contexts and the broader contexts of education and society (Barton, 2001; Barton, Hamilton, & Ivanic, 2000). We are interested in the ways in which teachers take up the values, perceptions, and the socio-cultural understandings of effective writing assessment and good writing in their day-to-day interactions with students. Feedback and assessment practices must be seen within the broader context of teachers’ professional constraints and mandates. In Canada, provinces and territories control education; each province and territory develops programs of studies for each subject area, and any large-scale testing is ostensibly based upon that curriculum, or upon some aspects of it. Although there is no national curriculum, there are regional frameworks underpinning provincial curricula, and so there are similarities across the curricula of the provinces and territories. They are predicated explicitly or implicitly on a social constructivist view of learning (Vygotsky, 1986) that promotes group work, collaboration, inquiry approaches, and classrooms in which students learn from one another (see Alberta Education, 2000; Nova Scotia Department of Education and Culture, 1998; Ontario Ministry of Education, 2006; Quebec Éducation, Loisir et Sport, 2001). With regard to the teaching of writing in particular, the curricula encourage teachers to consider the processes of writing and to have students write in varied forms and for varied audiences; the tenets of peer sharing and feedback are clearly consistent with a social constructivist framework. The curricula for English Language Arts, therefore, fit comfortably within the theoretical perspective of the foundational writing process advocates of recent decades (Atwell, 1987; Calkins, 1991; Graves, 1985, 1991; Murray, 1985). Such canonical representations of writing processes and writing instruction, however, have been critiqued as revealing overly Romantic views of the individual writer, taking neither the complexities of contemporary classrooms nor the full complexity of recursive writing processes into account (Lensmire, 1994, 2000). Both the early process approach advocates and subsequent modifiers of process approaches regard the social aspects of composition instruction as essential in successful writing instruction. Hairston (1982) noted a paradigm shift from focus on product alone to focus on process in her (perhaps premature) heralding of “the winds of change” in the teaching of writing. The extent to which this paradigm shift had or had not taken hold in Canadian writing instruction had not been explored, and our interview questions were partly designed to probe this issue. Among the theorists who view teaching, feedback, and assessment as integrally related in the classroom, Elbow (1973, 1997, 2000) has consistently stressed the importance of feedback that is timely and related both to the ongoing teaching and to the nature of the assigned composition. His call for attention to a number of “low-stakes” assessments and ample feedback at varying times throughout the duration of the assignments demonstrates awareness of and a sensible response to the pressures of classroom teaching and the requirement for teachers to provide summative judgments of the quality of student writing (1997). His emphasis on multiple opportunities for

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writers to seek feedback from multiple readers takes the subjectivity of writing assessment into account. Schwegler (1991) explains that feedback and assessment are social practices that will never be ideologically or politically neutral, regardless of teachers’ attempts to suppress the influence of their social and cultural perspectives. An understanding of the subjectivity of response to student writing is consistent with a social constructivist view of teaching and learning. 2. Literature review 2.1. Surveys of teachers’ assessment practices In the United States, researchers examined assessment and grading practices across the subject areas, identifying trends toward using performance assessments in place of paper-and-pencil assessments (McMillan, Myran, & Workman, 2003; Stiggins & Conklin, 1992). These researchers also found that teachers focused on students’ individual development. For example, the 921 grades 3-5 teachers participating in McMillan et al.’s survey (2003) placed greater emphasis on academic performance, effort and improvement than on comparisons with other students and grade distributions of other teachers. Ferris (1997) identifies a number of feedback techniques: peer response groups, teacher–student conferences, audiotaped commentary, e-mail comments or comments written on students’ drafts. Despite the wide range of available alternatives, teachers’ primary method of response, according to Ferris, has been written commentary. The predominance of written feedback is reflected in the focus of much of the research on writing assessment. This research has tended to identify patterns in teachers’ written comments, including teachers’ use of praise, when responding to student writing at the postsecondary level (Connors & Lunsford, 1993; Ferris, 1997; Read, Francis, & Robson, 2005; Stern & Solomon, 2006), and at the elementary and intermediate levels (DeGroff, 1992; Matsumura et al., 2002; Searle & Dillon, 1980). These studies found conflicting trends, some towards greater use of praise than negative comments (DeGroff, 1992; Smith, 1997) and others towards more frequent use of negative comments (Connors & Lunsford, 1993; Read et al., 2005). The content of the feedback was similar across studies, however, with elementary teachers in two studies (Matsumara, Patthye-Chavez, Valdes, & Garnier, 2002; Searle & Dillon, 1980) and secondary and university faculty in other studies (Lee, 2007; Stern & Solomon, 2006) focusing on form (word choice, spelling, paragraphing, sentence variety) to a greater degree than on the students’ development of ideas in their writing. 2.2. Effective practices in assessing and providing feedback on classroom writing Summarizing decades of work on response to writing (e.g., Harris, 1979; Lunsford, 1997; Mallonee & Breihan, 1985), Haswell (2006) advises that feedback to student writers should be “task specific, problem-specific, and learner-specific” (p. 16). He points out that students are more likely to grow as writers when feedback identifies patterns of errors, focusing on one or two features of the writing that could be improved and underscores the importance of developing relationships with each student to gain a sense of what students can do and how they respond to particular feedback approaches. Previous researchers have concluded that students should be held accountable for considering feedback they have received when carrying out their revisions, including submitting a ‘revise-andresubmit’ letter explaining how the feedback has been addressed or providing a rationale for disregarding it (Ferris, 1997). Teachers, peers and the student writers, themselves, should be involved

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in assessing the writing. Students should not only be given the assessment criteria and gain a clear understanding of the expectations, they should also have an opportunity to participate in determining the assessment criteria (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, & Wiliam, 2003; DeGroff, 1992). Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick (2006) propose principles for effective formative feedback—that which is intended to “accelerate learning” (p. 199). They argue that formative feedback should be directed toward self-regulation (students’ abilities to monitor their learning, to set goals and plan strategies to achieve those goals, to manage resources, and to exert the needed effort to achieve the goals), believing that learning in higher education would be enhanced through a greater emphasis on students’ regulation and control of their learning. Although their principles do not refer directly to feedback on writing and are geared toward adult students, they are useful in discussing assumptions and apprehensions that grades 4–8 teachers identify in their feedback practices. They recommend that teachers: • provide information about expectations. Standards, goals, and scoring criteria should be explained clearly, with exemplars. Teachers should collaborate with students to design scoring guides that incorporate students’ impressions of good written texts, and provide opportunities for students to provide feedback on writing samples in relation to defined criteria or standards; • facilitate students’ self-assessment. Teachers should guide students to assess their own writing using the criteria specified. • provide high quality information to students about their learning. The teacher provides corrective feedback while the writing is in progress, including praise and any troubleshooting advice that will help students to self-correct. • provide teacher and peer oral feedback. Talk allows students to show their interpretations of teachers’ feedback so that teachers can check and clarify students’ misunderstandings in progress. Peer feedback provides a range of perspectives and motivates other students to persist to overcome blocks because there is a sense that the peers share in the challenges of writing. • foster motivation and self-esteem. Teachers should provide feedback focusing on students’ writing and development as writers, rather than on grading the writing and showing how students’ writing compares to an externally imposed standard. • provide scaffolding to support students’ achievement of desired performance. Timely feedback provides direction to students to help them improve present and future writing. The emphasis should be on providing feedback for writing in progress, rather than for completed writing. Teachers should assist students in planning how they will use the feedback in future writing (p. 205). Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick’s principles and practices especially resonate with our research focus on the necessity of clear communication to students about teachers’ expectations and the opportunity for students to assess their own writing, as we discuss below. Taken together, their principles stress the central role of communication between and among teacher and students if feedback is to foster development of writing abilities. 3. Methods Data sources were telephone interviews with 216 grades 4–8 teachers of writing (162 female and 54 male teachers) both in rural and urban settings in the ten Canadian provinces and two of the three territories, and provincial and territorial curricula and large-scale writing assessment documents.

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We randomly selected schools in four districts, two urban and two rural, in each province and territory, where possible (not all provinces have four or more school districts). The sample consisted of 127 grades 4–6 teachers and 89 grades 7–8 teachers. We interviewed between 20 and 23 teachers from each province, with the exception of the primarily French province, Quebec, where we interviewed 17 teachers, the small province of Prince Edward Island, where we interviewed 14 teachers, and the two territories, where we interviewed six from the Northwest Territories and two teachers from the Yukon Territory. The interviews, averaging 30 min in length, were based on an interview protocol of 20 questions concerning all aspects of teachers’ contexts and practices for teaching writing. For the purpose of this article, we focus on questions relating to teachers’ assessment and feedback practices. These questions included: How do you give feedback to your students on their writing? What do you use to assess students’ writing? Do students give feedback to each other on their writing? How important do you feel that peer and teacher feedback is in helping students with their writing? We conducted the interviews to be as conversational as possible, with interviewers asking follow-up questions and prompting further explanations as appropriate. This informal approach allowed us to capture a broader range of issues related to writing instruction, as teachers highlighted important aspects of their particular contexts and discussed their practices extensively (Fontana & Frey, 1998). Of course, while interviews have the benefit of allowing participants to detail their own perspectives, they also have the limitation of being self-reported data without triangulation. Brandt and Clinton (2002) point out that the meanings and forms of literacy practiced by students and teachers are influenced by both local and global contexts. In interviews, teachers are able to bring up local references and issues that are part of their daily classroom lives. We set out to address the need for national data on the teaching of writing in Canada, but we were also mindful of the importance of local contexts. Indeed, some of our protocol questions asked directly about local contexts and their influences on teachers’ practices. Phase 2 of this research (in progress) will provide fine-grain contextualization and triangulation of the interviews of Phase 1. Phase 2 involves site visits to selected schools and districts, observations of class sessions, interviews with teachers and students, and samples of student writing. Our analysis draws upon grounded theory (Punch, 1998) in that our perspective is shaped through constant-comparison analysis (Glaser, 1992; Strauss & Corbin, 1994). Using the interview questions as a framework, we drew up thematic codes and then compared and standardized the codebooks. After coding the first 70 interviews using Excel 2007 (with additional macros), we reviewed the codebooks to determine how well the codes were capturing what teachers had said in interviews. This review resulted in our combining some codes, adding other codes and dropping codes, such as “other” that did not give useful information. The key issues and recurrent events that emerged became our categories of focus. We checked inter-coder reliability, which was 89%, talked together about discrepancies, and adjusted coding as necessary. 4. Findings 4.1. Number and type of assignments To understand teachers’ assessment and feedback practices, it is important to know how many and what types of writing teachers assign their students. Across the country, teachers assigned primarily print-based compositions. Creative writing (e.g., poetry, stories, plays), personal writing (e.g., journals, diaries), and subject area writing (e.g., descriptive writing, biographies, newspaper reports) were assigned most frequently. Table 1 shows the types of writing that participating

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Table 1 Assigned writing. Type of writing

Creative Writing (stories, poetry, scripts) Personal Writing (journals, diaries, memos, friendly letters, free writing) Subject Area Writing (descriptive writing, biographies, newspaper reports) Written Response to Text (reading response, reviews of literature, book reports) Academic/Research Writing (reports, essays, projects, logs, labs, definitions) Persuasive Writing (editorials, persuasive essays, speech writing) Sentence/Paragraph Writing Formal Writing (business letters, resumes, cover letters, applications) Prompt Writing (writing to picture prompts or story starters)

Total numbers of teachers who assigned the writing (N = 216)

Numbers of grade 4–6 teachers who assigned the writing (N = 127)

Numbers of grades 7–8 teachers who assigned the writing (N = 89)

195 162

124 110

71 52

151

87

64

116

72

44

107

61

46

83

43

40

67 44

36 22

31 22

31

25

6

teachers assigned their students, specifying the numbers of each type of writing assigned by teachers in the upper and lower grades. Persuasive writing was far more common at the grades 7–8 levels (44.9% of teachers at these grades) than at the grades 4–6 levels (33.8% of teachers at these grades). Writing to a prompt was far more common in the lower grades, as 19.6% of grades 4–6 teachers assigned this type of writing compared to 6.7% of grades 7–8 teachers who asked students to write in response to a prompt. The majority of participating teachers assigned between 1 and 10 writing assignments during each report card period, with 38.2% of teachers assigning 1–5 papers and 31.6% assigning 6–10 papers that were marked. Teachers in grades 4–6 generally assigned fewer papers during each reporting term than did teachers in grades 7–8. Eighteen percent of all the participating grades 4–6 teachers and 36% of all participating grades 7–8 teachers assigned 11 or more papers per reporting term. 4.2. Assumptions about feedback on student writing Participating teachers’ responses to questions about how they provide feedback to their students helped us to identify commonly held assumptions and values regarding the function of feedback and challenges in providing effective feedback. These assumptions and challenges were influential in determining the content, intentions, participants, and frequency of teachers’ feedback practices. Participating teachers’ feedback was directed toward nurturing students’ self-confidence as writers and guiding students to improve their writing. In stating this link between self-confidence and improvement in writing, teachers’ goals were similar to those of the 48 highly experienced university instructors of ESL/EFL composition (Cummings, 2001). Students’ self-esteem should be a consideration in how and what feedback is provided. Teachers were particularly concerned about the impact of feedback on students’ self-esteem and on their

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enjoyment and sense of ownership of their writing. A k-6 teacher in Quebec expressed the belief of many teachers: “I try not to be very critical. Sometimes it will be evaluated, sometimes it will not. I don’t want to tell them that it’s not good enough. I will put a check mark on it. I might make a note of how I felt the student did on it. I will often write ‘very good’ on it if I know that they actually tried; no matter what the quality is.” Similarly, a grades 6–7 teacher from Nova Scotia felt it was important to “boost the student’s confidence and help them to identify as a writer; help them realize that they do have important things to write about; that they can get their thoughts down and can communicate through writing in a way that’s meaningful.” The desire to provide encouraging feedback to sustain students’ motivation and sense of ownership of their writing pervades teachers’ comments about feedback. They commonly demonstrated sensitivity to students by considering the least intrusive means of providing written feedback, and this sensitivity may account for their emphasis on oral feedback. Although almost no teachers reported using technology to advantage in their provision of feedback or assessment, one grade 4–5 teacher in Alberta was an exception. This teacher spoke of using the “insert comment” feature in Word for teacher and peer feedback, noting its lack of intrusiveness. The kids love it. . .to get a piece of writing. . .and then you put your mouse over it and the little comment pops up. They love that, and they love giving peer feedback that way. And that’s actually one of the ways I track that they’re doing peer feedback. It’s a great little way because they love it and it’s not intrusive, . . .it’s not like pencil marks on a paper, it’s not there unless you put your mouse over that thing. And I find that very helpful. A lower-tech note was struck by a grade 5 Alberta teacher who uses “stickee” notes to preserve the integrity of student work and avoid the “red-pen” syndrome that can be very dispiriting for young writers: “I love stickee notes, just to always give them something, then they can always take it home with them, it doesn’t have to stay on the story.” Feedback should lead to improved writing. The majority of participating teachers (76.4%) observed that their feedback had influenced students’ revisions of their writing. A further 10.2% of teachers felt that their feedback had an effect on most students’ writing, but that some students did not consider teacher feedback when writing and revising. A grade 5–6 teacher from Nova Scotia explained: “If you don’t provide feedback to the child, they’re not going to change their writing. Feedback has to be constant and immediate.” Only 26 teachers discussed students’ self-assessment when they explained their writing assessment strategies. Self-assessment is a cornerstone of the “assessment for learning” perspective advocated by Black et al. (2003). They cite numerous studies showing that actively involving students in their learning (including assessing what they need to do to improve their writing and how to improve it) is closely linked to students’ development in all areas, including writing. The majority of teachers in this study, however, did not include student self-assessment in their practices. One hundred forty-two of the 216 participating teachers indicated that they provided written feedback to students on their writing. Many teachers expressed a view that the extensive amount of time that teachers devoted to writing comments provided evidence of how much they cared about their students as writers. As a grade 7 Nova Scotia teacher explained, “When they see that I’ve taken the time to write to them (and I write a lot), I see the smiles on their faces. It’s really very, very rewarding.” A grade 6 British Columbia teacher notes that although praise is important, it must be genuine: “I never give them praise unless it’s something deserved, though. I always actively look to find something that’s a genuine good thing. A lot of adults make the mistake of saying, ‘That’s great.

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That’s great,’ and you’ve not fooling anybody. It isn’t genuine and the kid doesn’t really bloom from it. I find they do if it’s genuine, if they really did do something really well. And then it’s easier than to give constructive criticism.” Oral feedback is essential. An even greater number (183) of participating teachers provided verbal feedback to students either informally or in scheduled formal student–teacher conferences. A grade 5 teacher from Saskatchewan highlighted the importance that teachers and students place on talking to students about their writing: “Students appreciate it. They look at the mark, but as far as improving and encouraging, it’s oral feedback that really helps.” A grade 6 teacher from British Columbia observed that face-to-face feedback enhanced students’ motivation to write: “I always find it works better if I can give them feedback verbally rather than writing on their paper, although I do both. I find they really do want to write better after the verbal feedback.” Although a greater percentage of grades 4–5 teachers used oral feedback (89.7% compared to 77.5% of grades 7–8 teachers), it was a very common practice across the grades. Thus, many upper grade teachers expressed similar convictions about the importance of verbal feedback, as exemplified by a grade 8 Ontario teacher: “You never really know how much attention, if any, is given to remarks that might be written on a page unless you can converse with the student in a two-way conversation and give them an idea and see how they feel about the idea.” Peer feedback is valuable, but must be supported by teacher. Peer feedback came in the forms of editing suggestions and/or peer response to content, often taking in a “one star and two wishes” structure, in which peers are taught to offer one positive comment before making suggestions for improvement. Another common procedure teachers identified was to pair stronger writers with weaker ones for peer consultations. Teachers in our study discussed both kinds of peer feedback. Peer editing was identified as an important source of feedback to students in 58.3% of participating teachers’ classrooms. A further 27.7% believed that the value of peer feedback was contingent upon the student’s receptiveness to the feedback. Participating teachers agreed with Tang and Tithecott (1999) that peer response fosters a strong sense of audience, as student writers “become aware of the reader for whom the text is composed” (p. 21). A grade 8 teacher from Nova Scotia, for example, asserted: “Peer feedback is so much more important than what I have to say to students, especially at this age. They value what their peers say more than they would what an adult says. I have to set this up, though, or it just goes to heck in a hand basket.” Their observations matched those of Peterson (2003), who observed that eighth-grade students used peer feedback “to gain a better conception of what was socially acceptable (or recognizable) within the classroom social group” (p. 268) and thus, to validate their social identities within the classroom. Many teachers, particularly those teaching grades 4 and 5, believed that peer comments are not always valuable. A grade 4 teacher from Quebec, for example, expressed concerns about students’ capabilities in providing useful feedback: “They’re not very good at giving feedback, yet. They say it’s all perfect and are not very critical of each other’s work. A goal for me is to help students be more critical.” Her observations echoed the findings of Dochy, Segers, & Shuijmans, 1999, whose examination of postsecondary students’ feedback to peers showed that the comments and suggestions can be superficial, particularly if teachers have not previously modeled and explained characteristics of effective feedback. Concerned about the limitations of peer feedback, teachers spoke of the need to teach students to give appropriate, useful peer feedback. A grade 5 Alberta teacher explained, You have to teach kids to effectively give feedback. Mark it, have three peers, mark it. It’s wonderful. Marvellous concept, but, unless you’ve taken the time, you can’t make the

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assumption that they know how to do it and it’s a waste of time. They’ll go to their friends and no friend wants to hurt anyone’s feelings. Develop checklists. I’ve done that. Make a checklist, follow the checklist; give this type of feedback; check for this, check for this. . Unless we make this a natural aspect of communication, it’s not effective. Writing portfolios are not widely used to demonstrate growth and promote self-assessment. Writing portfolios were used in only 33 of the 216 participating teachers’ classrooms. A greater percentage of the grades 4–6 teachers (17.3% as compared to 12.4% of grades 7–9 teachers) used portfolios, but the percentages were low for all grades. Teachers sometimes referred to writing portfolios and sometimes to writing folders; we coded references to writing folders as portfolios in cases where the teachers spoke of pedagogical uses rather than merely as repositories for writing. Teachers who do use writing portfolios spoke about the portfolios as springboards for self-assessment and reflection, as a means for students to realize their growth. One grade 8 teacher in British Columbia, for example, noted: Students have writing folders that hold examples of their work over time (over years) that show growth and experimentation. The feedback is essential—learning is about growth and change. Without something physical to refer to, the ability to see the change is difficult. A Nova Scotia grade 5 teacher explained the importance of writing portfolios for students to monitor their growth. She noted that her students are quite able to do self-assessment: And I like to keep their portfolios, and I like to keep a number of pieces that they start at the beginning of the year, to middle of the year, to end of the year, so they get to chart their progress as well and then see how well they have developed as writers from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. And I also like them to do self-evaluation, which I find very informative for them as well as for myself. And normally some people may assume that you give kids the opportunity to evaluate themselves; that it’s something that they’re going to abuse. No, it’s not. I have never had that experience. They actually evaluate themselves honestly and sometimes they’re a little harsh on themselves. Very few teachers spoke of the roles of parents in connection to their writing programs and pedagogy. Two teachers, however, who did mention parental involvement when speaking about writing portfolios captured the extremes of positive and negative parental participation. A grade 6 Manitoba teacher structured her writing portfolios with an explicit role for parents, and she noted the importance of their demonstration of support. I always ask the kids to get their parents to edit in purple so I know the parents have done it. That’s the parent colour, and so that I can see if they’ve provided any suggestions. A lot of times they’ll write little notes. I have a parent editing form that the parents can fill out; it’s just a note of encouragement towards the student. And then the student can see that that they’re involved in that. I also have a parent section in their portfolios that go home, where the parents can be involved in writing comments and just words of encouragement to their child. That’s a huge support. This teacher’s intentional, explicit role for parents is apparently very successful; another Manitoba teacher, however, reported that parental involvement is not necessarily positive. This grade 4 teacher emphasized the establishment of a safe classroom environment, where ideas are paramount and students know that “they’re not going to get picked apart for every little spelling error.” She found that many parents do not see beyond the spelling errors and thus they counteract her teaching:

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When parents come in they’ll read the whole reams of writing and they’ll be looking at this portfolio and they’re not looking past the fact that [the student] didn’t capitalize an “I” or something. And here this kid has got all these beautiful ideas expressed so creatively and using such good descriptive words and voice, and all this stuff, and they’re cutting them down for their spelling. And so then a kid, instead of writing a paragraph, they’re going to write two sentences and make sure every word is spelled correctly, but they say nothing. So I think right now that’s what’s inhibiting the kids the most. These two teachers have very different expectations and experiences of parental involvement in their writing programs. These differing experiences serve as a reminder that teachers must be very clear and structured to teach parents helpful ways to support their children’s progress in writing. It is certainly easy to imagine the parents who focus only on misspelled words, as that was often the focus of their own writing experience in schools. The subjective nature of writing assessment is problematic for teachers. Teachers struggled with the subjective nature of writing assessment, and their responses to our questions indicated some misunderstandings of this subjectivity. Some teachers only provided written comments, explaining that because their assessment was subjective, they did not feel confident in assigning a numerical grade to the writing. A grade 8 British Columbia teacher explained the process that she used: “I do give comments on their writing sometimes. I always use performance standards (we have performance standards in BC and I use them). I highlight the words on the performance standards that describe their writing.” Many teachers (139) used tools with exemplars and pre-specified criteria, such as provincial scoring guides and rubrics, to provide feedback and to determine grades. The use of exemplars and pre-specified criteria was noticeably higher among the grades 4–6 teachers (74.8%) than among participating grades 7–8 teachers (49.4%). Teachers believed that focusing on the criteria and basing their marking on the provincial standards exemplified in writing exemplars neutralized individual teachers’ particular preferences and predilections. 5. Conclusions and implications In summary, the pedagogy that teachers describe in this study reflects a social constructivist orientation (Vygotsky, 1986) in that student and teacher talk permeates the writing process, providing assistance and scaffolding for improvements for work in progress. Communication among teachers and students is essential for effective assessment, as Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick (2006) advocate, and the teachers in this study certainly report an emphasis on productive, supportive talk. We note that the writing itself is mostly independently composed, however, and that collaboration in writing is presented more as peer assistance than as collaborative writing. Writing is viewed by teachers as a social practice in the sense that feedback from teacher and peers is important. But writing seems not to be a social practice in terms of the actual writing texts that students create in their courses. Teachers report more group projects and collaborative writing in subject-area report-writing, but in the “creative” and more expressive forms that dominate their practices, an individual student is responsible for the writing product. Teachers participating in this study follow some of the practices that Nicol and MacfarlaneDick (2006) identify as effective when providing feedback to students on their writing. Enhancing students’ motivation and self-esteem as writers was a paramount goal in their feedback practices. They live in the tension between the desire to teach children that writing is an important means of creative self-expression and the necessity to put marks on student work. They manage this tension by promoting journals and “creative” work with less focus on marks, as compared to subject-

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area writing and reports, to which they are more comfortable assigning marks. They encourage teacher and peer dialogue by scheduling time for peer editing and student–teacher conferences. Black et al. (2003) note four areas of important ideas for transformative assessment practices: questioning, feedback, sharing criteria, and self-assessment. Of these four areas, the teachers in our study were highly conscious of the importance of providing feedback and sharing criteria, but were less focused on questioning and promoting self-assessment. Only a small number of teachers facilitated students’ self-assessment. The few teachers who use writing portfolios indicate that self-assessment and reflection are key aspects of portfolio use. These teachers spoke convincingly and in detail about students being able to see their own growth and development by reflecting on the writing over time that is collected in the portfolio. These 216 teachers believe that praise and encouragement are key ingredients of student improvement in writing. This consistency in their view contrasts with the research involving university-level teachers of writing, which indicates a split among those who use praise more than negative comments (DeGroff, 1992; Smith, 1997) and those who make more frequent use of negative comments (Connors & Lunsford, 1993; Read et al., 2005). At the university level, feedback to students is predominantly written, but in our study of grades 4–8 teachers, verbal feedback predominates. We noted an interesting assumption that was quite pervasive among participating teachers. Teachers spoke often and with acceptance of the provincial rubrics and performance standards criteria that are used for provincially mandated standardized testing. Obviously, teachers need to be able to work with these criteria in preparing students for standardized testing. However, we noted an absence of any questioning about the value or limitations of these rubrics and performance indicators for all assessment of student writing. The assumption, commonly stated explicitly or implied tacitly, was that teachers could make their marking “objective” by using these rubrics and performance indicators. The subjectivity of assessment of written work was a cause of discomfort for many teachers, but they seemed resolved in their confidence in the external criteria that were developed for particular writing events. They appear to be cloaking the ideological nature of assessment, of making their readings ideologically neutral (Schwegler, 1991). It strikes us that the teachers’ reliance on rubrics and statements of performance indicators to somehow make assessment “objective” is consistent with the ways in which considerations of assessment and pedagogy are commonly divided in faculties of education. Traditionally, assessment has been the domain of educational psychology, while teaching is the domain of curriculum studies (Slomp, 2007). Pre-service teachers learn about making large-scale testing more reliable, while in their curriculum and pedagogy courses they focus more on the connections between teaching and assessing. This mistaken assumption that assessing writing in a classroom context can somehow be objective may be an artifact of this split in their pre-service education. In this article, we have reported teachers’ comments regarding feedback and assessment practices, a particular area within our larger study of the teaching of writing at the middle level in Canadian classrooms. There are a number of implications – both for professional development and for research – to be drawn from this aspect of the larger study. Although portfolios have been highly regarded for decades now (e.g., Hamp-Lyons, 2002; Yancey, 1998), few of the Canadian teachers participating in our research have taken them up as part of their teaching and assessment practices. Indeed, the overall lack of teachers’ focus on student self-assessment indicates an area for professional development for many teachers. In concert with Huot’s (2002) observations, it appears that writing teachers either do not see the contributions of student self-assessment to their writing development or have difficulty in

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supporting students to assess their own writing effectively. Teachers who use portfolios tend to understand how they help students reflect on their growth and to assess their own progress as writers. Professional development that helps teachers to manage and exploit the potential of writing portfolios as tools for student self-assessment could be a powerful addition to teachers’ practices. Many teachers already include some practices that could help students do self-assessment – for example, giving students information on criteria and providing models of good writing – and these are useful steps toward teaching students to recognize their own growth and set goals as writers. Teachers identified their colleagues and school administrators as having had the greatest influence on their assessment practices; therefore, professional development initiatives in assessment would do well to have a school-wide focus. Teachers did not identify technology as an influential factor, nor did they talk about how they would modify their assessments for multi-modal texts. These issues, together with teachers’ distrust of the subjective nature of writing assessment, are fruitful areas to examine in professional development initiatives. A direction for future research is evident from this data. The teachers in our study overwhelmingly rely on oral feedback. They note that it allows them to make positive comments to nurture students’ self-esteem and motivation to write, and they see oral feedback as essential for student growth and development. Because teachers rely heavily on verbal feedback, researchers need to investigate it further to develop an understanding of what students actually “hear” and understand from the verbal commentary. This area of teaching, however, is fiendishly difficult to investigate with any authenticity. Participating teachers provide informal, impromptu oral feedback during writing conferences that are often unscheduled and arise as needed during a writing period. If teachers’ pedagogy rests so firmly upon oral feedback, then researchers and teachers ought to have a better understanding of what actually is taught and learned in this manner. It is also important to investigate the relation of oral to written feedback in teaching at this level of schooling. In considering ways for researchers and teachers to make productive explorations of these issues, we anticipate that newer writing environments will offer rich possibilities to conduct in situ studies of authentic feedback practices. The absence of a record of the informal oral feedback that teachers provide, hitherto a stumbling block for teachers and students alike, may be a surmountable obstacle. If teachers and/or researchers can develop practices such as working with GarageBand and other easy-recording devices on computers, they may find classroom-manageable ways to record teachers’ or peers’ oral feedback for students to reflect upon and revisit as they revise their work. Similarly, a short podcast with a minute or two of feedback could be attached to a blog entry in which a student explains how he/she revised with the feedback in mind. Such practices are beyond the management abilities of most teachers right now but may be increasingly possible within the next several years. The teachers who participated in this study speak in rich, authentic ways about their goals and practices in the teaching of writing. Their commentary makes a powerful reminder of the passion and skill that teachers bring to their students. In discussing their feedback and assessment practices with us, Canadian teachers highlight the many competing demands that teachers face every hour in their classrooms and in their planning for teaching. The teaching of writing is a complex, intricate enterprise, one that intrigues teachers and researchers alike. Acknowledgements This research was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant. The authors are grateful to the funding agency and especially thankful to all teachers who participated

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