Tips for Providing Feedback on Written Assignments

Written assignments on Listenwise are open-ended, and you will need to review, grade, and provide feedback on student work. The platform supports documentation and communication of this feedback to individual students, and you can ask students to revise and resubmit their work based on your feedback.  

There are three parts to written assignments, and you may choose to use any or all of them as they are or customize them to suit your needs: 

Comprehension questions – These are open-ended, text-dependent questions that can be answered through close listening to the podcast and/or reading the transcript. They typically assess basic comprehension skills, inviting students to demonstrate their understanding of key facts and ideas in the story. Teachers may set and apply their own expectations for demonstrating comprehension (e.g., accuracy, form, etc.) and share feedback accordingly. 

Writing prompts – These are open-ended questions related to the story that invite students to analyze, synthesize, evaluate, or apply their understanding to another context while demonstrating their writing skills. They work well for discussion and/or extended writing activities. Students should be advised to use complete sentences and paragraphs and use standard conventions in responding to these questions, in accordance with criteria for extended written responses to informational texts. Assessment of these responses is assisted by the Writing Assessor, which provides an ELP level demonstrated by the writing, as well as feedback on strengths and suggestions for improvement in alignment with standard ELP writing rubrics. You can review and edit this feedback before you share it with students. 

Assignment score – Written Assignments also offer the opportunity for you to assign an overall score to the assignment on a scale of 1 to 5, according to your own criteria. You may assign a score based on completion, or provide a competence-based grade that aligns with a rubric of your choice. You may also add a comment to explain your score if you wish. 

Here are some tips to review assignments and provide feedback: 

• When reviewing work, either from your dashboard or from the Classes page of your teacher dashboard, you'll see that submissions status is color-coded to help you quickly see who started or completed the assignment.
• Teachers love the “Time Spent” data point because it provides insight into how long students spend on each assignment. 
• While you can provide a score for the assignment, it's helpful to also provide constructive feedback on written assignments to help improve their writing skills. This blog post offers suggestions.