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Barnett, D L --- "Form Ever Follows Function: Using Technology to Improve Feedback on Student Writing in Law School" [2007] LegEdDig 53; (2007) 15(3) Legal Education Digest 50

Form Ever Follows Function: Using Technology to Improve Feedback on Student Writing in Law School

D L Barnett

[2007] LegEdDig 53; (2007) 15(3) Legal Education Digest 50

Boston C L, Leg St Research P S, Research Paper 140, September 26, 2007, pp 1–55

Critiquing student papers is an important responsibility of many law professors, including teachers in first-year and advanced legal-writing courses and professors who teach courses that include writing assignments. Providing feedback on student writing is time consuming and intellectually challenging. In most situations, the teacher must diagnose the major analytical flaws in the student’s paper and provide the student adequate guidance to rewrite the paper. Therefore, the teacher should carefully consider the content and form of feedback that will be most efficient for the teacher and most helpful to the students.

The goal of this article is to encourage law professors to examine the different critiquing formats available and to consider using some form of electronic critique. The article does not promote the use of technology simply because it is available. Rather, moving to an electronic critique format could help many teachers be more proficient when providing comments to their students’ writing. While many considerations may support the use of either traditional or electronic critique methods, many factors support moving to some type of electronic commenting. Furthermore, advances in technology coupled with the technological savvy and comfort level of today’s student, probably will eventually dictate that all law teachers who comment on student papers use some kind of electronic feedback. Therefore, teachers should begin to evaluate how current technology could improve their methods of providing feedback on student assignments and prepare themselves to use these tools.

Handwritten comments on hard copy, is the time-tested method for critiquing student assignments. The physical interaction between the teacher’s comments and the paper copy of the student’s writing often helps the teacher focus her comments and think about the best advice the student needs on the assignment.

The space limitations and physical demands of handwritten comments often forces teachers to carefully choose the issues from each student paper to address in the comments. This process of prioritisation is an important part of giving helpful critique to students.

Although the immediacy of handwritten margin comments may be helpful to many students, writing comments in the margins can give the impression that the professor has taken control of the student’s paper by writing all over it.

Furthermore, margin comments naturally break up the writing and the revision process for the student because they focus on individual issues in the student’s paper. Providing several specific comments to individual issues may not allow the professor to fully reflect on the root of the various problems in the paper. If the teacher relies too heavily on margin comments, she may not take the necessary time to understand and explain the true problem. In addition, a student’s ability to incorporate the different separate comments in the revision process may be less effective because the student may have a difficult time using the comments holistically to bring the paper together.

The use of longer summary comments may help alleviate some of the shortcomings of margin comments. However, handwriting long summary comments are time consuming and physically exhausting.

Another limitation of handwritten comments is that making changes to them is very difficult. The only way to make changes to earlier comments is to erase them or cross them out. Confidence in the teacher’s feedback may be reduced by leaving erasure marks or crossing out comments on a paper. Finally, handwritten comments are often difficult for the student to use because handwritten comments are sometimes hard to read.

Distributing global comments to the entire class is a technique that many teachers have found helpful. Providing a description of the problems the entire class encountered with an assignment often helps students identify and more fully understand the problems in their own papers and helps them realise that they were not the only ones to make substantive mistakes in the draft.

Instead of handwritten comments, the teacher can provide typed comments in a separate document that is printed and attached to the student’s paper when it is returned. The comments can be numbered and the corresponding number inserted by hand on the student’s paper. Using this numbering technique allows the professor to type the margin comments in addition to the longer summary comments at the end of sections and the paper overall.

This method is good for several reasons, in addition to being easy to read. Typing comments in a separate document with numbered references provides the student with in-depth comments while leaving the student’s own paper intact. Thus, the typed comments do not risk destroying the integrity of the student’s work the way handwritten comments can.

Moreover, typed comments seem more authoritative and help demonstrate that the teacher has given serious consideration to the student’s writing. Demonstrating the care the teacher has taken in providing feedback should help students feel encouraged to work with the teacher’s suggestions in the revision process and may help the comments feel less personally critical to the students than handwritten comments.

Typing comments also allows the teacher to use master comments. Then, instead of rewriting the comment for each paper, the teacher can copy and paste the master comment at the appropriate place in the critique. The teacher can easily tailor the master comment to address the specific problems in the student’s writing. The use of tailored master documents saves time and may help ensure fairness.

Typing comments and referring to them by number in the student’s paper also allows for easy reference to a comment when the same issue appears in the student’s paper more than once.

Live conferencing is a technique where the professor critiques the student paper during the teacher-student conference. The teacher reads and reacts to the paper as the student is sitting in the meeting with the teacher, thus avoiding the need to read and critique a paper and then meet with the student after the critique has been returned. Meeting with students to review their papers individually provides the teacher with instant feedback from the student and helps the teacher understand if her comments are being received accurately. The give and take of this discussion often provides a more complete feedback experience. In a live meeting with the student, the professor is able to ask exactly what the student was attempting to explain in the paper or ask why the student chose a certain way of articulating his ideas.

Live conferencing does have several important limitations. The use of live conferencing is difficult on graded assignments and impossible with anonymously graded assignments. Furthermore, some teachers have difficulty reading student papers during a conference and reacting immediately to the student’s work. Therefore, the teacher may need to read the paper and take notes before meeting with the student. Taking notes on the paper before the conference creates more work and therefore eliminates much of the efficiency benefit of live conferencing. In addition, if the teacher reads the paper before the conference, the student does not benefit from the teacher’s immediate reaction as the reader, which is one of the main benefits of the live grading experience.

Furthermore, if the teacher is providing lengthy analytical comments during the critique, the student meetings need to be much longer than traditional conferences because the teacher needs time to critique the student paper and discuss her suggestions with the student.

Finally, some students are unable to take accurate notes during the live conference. Without accurate notes of the meeting, students are not able to effectively use the feedback when rewriting the assignment.

Some teachers prefer recorded voice comments to provide feedback. Voice comments allow the teacher to provide extensive feedback quickly and efficiently. Teachers can number comments on the hard copies of the assignments and record corresponding comments. Teachers can respond immediately to the student’s writing and explain the teacher’s reaction easily with recorded comments. Because the teacher is talking about the paper, rather than writing down her reactions, the comments tend to be more extensive and more conversational than written comments. Often, this combination of extensive reactions in a conversational voice forces the student to identify the underlying problem that caused the teacher’s reaction. Forcing the student to identify the problems from the teacher’s reactions is a useful learning tool to help the student uncover the true issues through the reader’s reaction.

Practically, voice comments give the teacher many options of where to place comments and what approach to take on the critique. The teacher may simply work through the paper chronologically and provide her reactions to the student paper as she works through the paper using numbered comments. Or the teacher may decide that longer comments at the ends of sections may be best for a particular student, so the teacher can read an entire section and provide one long comment for that section.

Finally, voice comments may be easier on some teachers physically. When recording comments, the teacher is not required to sit at a desk, but may walk around with a portable recorder to record the comments.

There are several disadvantages to voice comments. First, the ability to make extensive comments may mean the teacher does not prioritise her comments sufficiently. The lack of prioritisation may make the revision process more overwhelming for the student.

In addition, the teacher must be very aware of the tone of her voice when recording comments.

Using voice comments also creates challenges when meeting with students to discuss their papers. With voice comments, referring to the comments themselves is much more difficult.

Current technology offers a variety of electronic critiquing options. Basic commenting and editing features of word processing applications allow teachers to comment on papers electronically in much the same way they would provide feedback on hard copies of the assignments. Other features offer flexibility and other advantages over handwritten critique. Therefore, some type of electronic feedback may be an option for all teachers, even those who are convinced of the advantages of traditional handwritten comments.

The easiest way to begin using electronic commenting is to use the feature of word processing applications that allows the user to insert comments and make editing changes to the text. The teacher can insert short margin comments and editing changes at relevant places in the text and provide longer summary end comments where appropriate. To make a margin comment, the teacher simply highlights text and then selects the option to insert a comment. The teacher can insert shorter comments in ‘balloons’ that appear in the margins and longer comments in the text of the student’s paper. For comments that do not fit in the balloons, the comment feature automatically puts the entire comment in an endnote format at the bottom of the page.

In addition to inserting comments to the text, word processing applications allow the teacher to give editing advice to the student using the ‘track changes’ function. This feature allows the teacher to make deletions and changes to the document that are tracked and highlighted by the word processing application.

Inserting typed comments electronically in the student assignments provides practical advantages. The teacher can transport all of the papers in her laptop. Students can e-mail their assignments to the professor or a third party if papers are graded anonymously.

The comment feature in Microsoft Word also allows the insertion of digital voice comments in documents.

The voice comment feature provides all of the same benefits of taped comments. In addition, the feature provides the flexibility to insert the voice comments directly into the student’s paper so the comment is more immediate than taped comments.

With taped comments, the teacher has to record all comments chronologically. With the voice comment feature, the teacher can go back and forth throughout the draft to insert comments when the teacher thinks it is appropriate.

Another advantage of the voice comment feature is that the comments may be copied and pasted into other documents.

Although the return of student papers should be very simple when using voice comments because the student papers are returned as one document with all comments, the size of the files with voice comments creates several challenges. The files of the critiqued papers with the voice comments use a tremendous amount of memory. Using e-mail to transfer the documents is also very difficult, if not impossible. Uploading the files from a home internet connection, even a high-speed connection, can be time consuming.

Recording comments with a digital recorder is another option for providing voice comments electronically.

The use of a digital recorder provides some benefits over the voice comment feature of word processing applications because it avoids some of the technical problems.

The major disadvantage of digital recorders is that the comments cannot be embedded in the student’s paper. Therefore, the teacher must return the student’s paper as one file and the digitally recorded comments separately.

The amount and type of feedback that students may need varies from course to course and problem to problem. Electronic comments might be best for long, detailed comments, while handwritten comments could be the most practical technique for providing feedback with shorter specific comments.

Furthermore, the teacher’s own writing process and teaching style will affect the type of critique that is most effective for the teacher. Handwritten comments may be the best vehicle for those who like to react quickly to student writing, while longer typed comments may help teachers who use the writing process to clarify their ideas because they can use the word processing applications to quickly revise their ideas as they are writing them.

The fact that people process writing differently when reading from a computer screen than writing in hard copy might convince some teachers that traditional hard copy critique is better for them and the student.

While many factors could support the use of either traditional hardcopy or electronic comments, several considerations may tip the balance in favour of electronic critique for many teachers. The learning styles of current law students have been affected by the integrated use of technology at home and in education since our current students were young children. Thus, working with electronic comments is the way they would naturally process information because they learned to read and write using technology. By using a format they are accustomed to, students will have an easier time working with the feedback and therefore the time spent on providing comments will be more effective.

The need to prepare our students for law practice is another factor that supports the use of electronic critique. Most lawyers in practice are now revising documents electronically for inter-office use and to negotiate language of agreements in transactions. Furthermore, many courts and administrative agencies are moving to a paperless system. Therefore, students need to learn how to manipulate documents electronically and process others’ comments in an electronic medium. Training students to use electronic comments in law school will help prepare them for what they will experience in practice.

In addition, the use of electronic commenting might appear more professional to the students because the teacher is taking advantage of technology to provide the feedback. In addition, by using the most advanced format of comments, it appears that the teacher has taken the student’s work seriously and has invested a substantial amount of time and thought into the critique.

Moreover, the ease of electronic submission and return of student assignments provides efficiency and may soon be the norm expected in all law school courses. The automatic time record of electronic submission also avoids the debate of when papers were actually submitted that sometimes occurs with hard copies of student assignments. Similarly, assignment return is very easy electronically.

Although making our students happy should not be the primary goal in teaching, if the use of technology helps the students feel more positive about their writing experience in law school, their positive reaction to the use of technology should be considered when determining the best critique format to use.

In most feedback, I provide a combination of fairly directive comments with more open-ended Socratic questions that challenge students to rethink their ideas.

Guiding student learning by commenting on their writing is a central part of the mission of teaching the law effectively. Law professors must focus on the substance of their comments, but must also recognise that the mechanics of how they critique their students’ writing is important because it affects the substance of their feedback. While traditional hand-copy techniques may have benefits, some form of electronic feedback is probably necessary to effectively, efficiently and practically provide the type of critique that is needed in most law courses. Teachers should embrace technology and begin to consider the different electronic modes of critique that will allow them to use the most effective method for them to provide the best quality feedback possible to their students.


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