Using Computers to Assess Writing

As Huot discusses in his “Computers and Assessment: Understanding Two Technologies,” he argues against notions of using technology to relieve the drudgery of grading student papers and as a more efficient way of grading papers. He follows Sirc’s assertion that we should use computers as a medium for responding to student writing (239) and argues that they can be especially useful for collecting and responding to portfolios.

I find using computers to respond to student writing useful for additional reasons. One is a personal reason: my handwriting is akin to hieroglyphics to anyone who has never studied them. Oftentimes I would wonder why students kept making the same mistakes over and over again. Unfortunately, I made the mistake many novice teachers do by assuming that they were just not interested in improving their writing. After feedback from classes and on student evaluations, I realized that deciphering my handwriting was a large part of the problem. Now, I have students submit their essays on Vista or in email so that I can type comments throughout the paper and give a summary statement at the end. This happens to be more time efficient for me because I type faster than I can write. However, the more important issue is that my students are able to understand my comments.

Another benefit of responding to student writing with computers is to demonstrate academic conventions. I write my comments in blue in their text with brackets around my words to show where I have inserted comments. I used to use the Comments tool until I received too much feedback that students were unable to read them since they had older versions of Microsoft Word. By using brackets to insert my voice into theirs, I reinforce the fact that different voices need to be signaled in the text in some way (a lesson on using sources/voices) and the notion that a writer cannot change the words of another author without telling the audience that they are doing so (using brackets to facilitate the audience’s understanding of the quote). A (“feel good”) side note: I like to use blue, as opposed to red, because it is less threatening and “cooler.” Color, of course, is only one part of the way that students’ respond to a teacher’s comments, in addition to the quantity, tone of voice, explanation (or lack of), praise, and illumination of options. Nonetheless, it is part of my overall strategy to encourage improvement.

A last benefit that I see for using the computer as a medium for response to student writing is that the malleability of the Word document (i.e., REVISION) is fore-grounded. Writing may be more clearly seen as a recursive process through the use of computer-mediated responses. By printing out a document it looks final and finished. On the other hand, submitting it to an instructor and having that instructor change the inside of the document highlights that writing is in flux. The resulting revision of the document also may also highlight this process as recursive. Although, this does depend on how the instructor responds to the student’s writing—if the response is not based in a rhetorical and recursive understanding of writing, the affordances of the document alone will not facilitate this type of understanding just as portfolios can be used without the theory behind it being employed. All in all, I find that computer-mediated responding is the best way for me to respond on both a personal and theoretical level.