15
Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Assessing Writing “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers Nicki Litherland Baker Ball State University, Department of English, Muncie, IN 47306, United States a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Available online 5 December 2013 Keywords: Writing assessment Activity theory Paper grading Teacher workload Teacher feedback Writing productivity a b s t r a c t Using activity theory to contextualize paper responding and grad- ing processes, this qualitative case study uses interviews and artifacts of three first-year composition instructors to identify ways they cope with the tedious and copious work. Data reveal that tea- chers practice previously—discovered writing habits of successful writers. Those habits, among others, include creating self-imposed goals, dividing work into manageable chunks, using physical and psychological tools such as information charts and rewards, man- aging criticism from their paper-grading communities, and sharing work. In light of the results, the researcher calls for administra- tors’ increased attention to recognition and rewards and decreased criticism in the writing assessment world. Results also indicate a need for greater contextual analyses of teachers’ behavior, tool use, and community interactions. Attention to the social and cul- tural construction of the paper-grading process will help teachers with the real jobs they have before them that may not conform to the snapshots of isolated actions sometimes presented in writing assessment research. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Even those outside the teaching profession know writing teachers have tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming processes to complete each time they collect a set of papers. How often have we received sympathetic responses, as if we’ve reported the death of a pet, from those who ask what we teach? Authors of journal articles have long been trying to help with this problem. In 1980, over Tel.: +1 765 285 8379. E-mail address: [email protected] 1075-2935/$ see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2013.11.005

“Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Assessing Writing

“Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for gradingpapers

Nicki Litherland Baker ∗

Ball State University, Department of English, Muncie, IN 47306, United States

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Available online 5 December 2013

Keywords:Writing assessmentActivity theoryPaper gradingTeacher workloadTeacher feedbackWriting productivity

a b s t r a c t

Using activity theory to contextualize paper responding and grad-ing processes, this qualitative case study uses interviews andartifacts of three first-year composition instructors to identify waysthey cope with the tedious and copious work. Data reveal that tea-chers practice previously—discovered writing habits of successfulwriters. Those habits, among others, include creating self-imposedgoals, dividing work into manageable chunks, using physical andpsychological tools such as information charts and rewards, man-aging criticism from their paper-grading communities, and sharingwork. In light of the results, the researcher calls for administra-tors’ increased attention to recognition and rewards and decreasedcriticism in the writing assessment world. Results also indicatea need for greater contextual analyses of teachers’ behavior, tooluse, and community interactions. Attention to the social and cul-tural construction of the paper-grading process will help teacherswith the real jobs they have before them that may not conform tothe snapshots of isolated actions sometimes presented in writingassessment research.

© 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction

Even those outside the teaching profession know writing teachers have tedious, repetitive, andtime-consuming processes to complete each time they collect a set of papers. How often have wereceived sympathetic responses, as if we’ve reported the death of a pet, from those who ask whatwe teach? Authors of journal articles have long been trying to help with this problem. In 1980, over

∗ Tel.: +1 765 285 8379.E-mail address: [email protected]

1075-2935/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2013.11.005

Page 2: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

N.L. Baker / Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50 37

30 years ago, for example, Williams attempted to reduce teacher workload in secondary schools,noting that the most effective teaching techniques required large amounts of time and smallerteacher-to-student ratios. He instructed teachers to order a kit from the National Council of Teachersof English (NCTE) that included information for teachers, unions, legislators, and the public aboutwhy English/language arts teachers needed smaller workloads. Instead of seeing improvement forsecondary schools 17 years later, Clark (1997) noted the spread of the workload problem into post-secondary institutions: “Excessive teaching loads apparently are now becoming a source of academicburnout, importing into higher education the teacher burnout long noted as a problem in the K-12system,” he observed (p. 33).

Empirical researchers have also studied the negative effects of excessive workload. Easthope andEasthope (2000), through interviews and focus groups of college and high school teachers, exploredthe implications of increased student numbers per teacher as well as increased duties outside of class.This intensification, according to the teachers, reduced the time they could spend on classroom prepa-ration and individual student attention. As a result, teachers had to forego their commitment to theextra care they previously gave to preparation and feedback. These attempts to inform educationalinstitutions have caused little change. NCTE’s official stance for secondary English/language arts tea-chers (1990) is that class sizes should be limited to 20, and the total number of students teachersshould teach in a week should not exceed 80. However, neither I nor any of the secondary teachersI know or worked with in the last 10 years had class sizes consistently that small or a total loadthat low. As for university classes, NCTE (1987) recommends writing classes have between 15 and20 students, with student totals per instructor not to exceed 60. Full-time composition instructorsat my current university can have as many as 125 students per term with a class cap of 25 stu-dents. Ritter’s (2012) documentation of the history of these problems attest—nothing has fixed theproblem. Given the persistence of larger class sizes for whatever reasons, the issue is evidently hereto stay.

When our hard work causes students to learn and improve their writing, the rewards can sustainus through the next paper stack, but students do not always appreciate our efforts. As we per-sistently deal with the large grading load and the sometimes unrewarding job, authors continueto publish books that give us more ideas for instruction and assessment (e.g., White, 2007) andadvice about managing the load (e.g., Golub, 2005). Although clarifying in many respects, some ofthe response studies conducted by compositionists conflict with our experiential knowledge abouthow our own students learn and respond to teaching and writing feedback. These articles can alsoconflict with the realities of a full work load, instructor training, or staff development resources. Some-times these conflicts exist because the publications ignore context or local issues in their studies orsometimes because they fail to consider the motivational toll of grading. New feedback studies cankeep us from reverting to rules-based grading, but instructors need to know that the authors of arti-cles consider their realistic situations. Specifically, writing teachers need help coping with the largeand emotionally-draining paper-grading workload without compromising their students’ writingneeds.

To fill the contextual gaps currently existing in the assessment literature, the study reported in thisarticle aims to answer the following research questions:

(1) What aspects of paper grading do writing instructors report struggling with the most?(2) What tools do writing teachers say they use to cope with the challenges of grading

papers?

To answer these questions, I review relevant literature on grading papers. Next, I describe activitytheory and explain how its use in this present study reveals formerly unexplored aspects of gradingpapers. Because these aspects deal with productivity, I describe literature pertaining to the com-pletion of other writing tasks that applies to grading papers as well. Methods of data collectionand coding procedures precede a description of the situatedness of the three first-year composi-tion instructors who participated in the study. I present the results in the framework of activitytheory and work published by productivity scholars, finishing with a discussion of the implications

Page 3: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

38 N.L. Baker / Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50

for administrators and others who work with and write for current or future teachers who assignwriting.

1.1. Review of feedback literature

Despite the usual feedback or response used in composition literature, I chose to use the termgrading in the title because I and almost every English teacher I’ve worked with say we’re gradingpapers. Only when I began studying assessment as a scholar did I learn that grading is a specific term,referring to writing evaluation that gives a grade or assigns a value to the piece. Formative assessment,on the other hand, is feedback given as students form their pieces to help guide the process (Huot,2002). As seen in Section 3, the teachers in this study perceived this activity as assigning a grade,but they expected students to use feedback for future assignments and contexts. Two of the teachersalso allowed students to revise graded work and resubmit. In fact, some of the participants’ struggleswith commenting came from their desire to include comments that would help students learn. Forthese reasons, the teachers’ responding and grading processes could be considered both assessing asformative as well as grading as evaluative, not as assessing or grading. In this article, then, I do notdistinguish between grading, assessing, commenting, responding, or giving feedback. The instructorsuse the terms interchangeably, and so do I.

Just as Huot’s article helped writing instructors understand the difference between the kinds ofreading we do for students’ papers, other studies and discursive articles have made us aware of theimportance of teacher feedback. White (1994) and DeCarlo (2005) explained that grading papers startslong before the draft is due. When we make assignments and go through writing stages with students,we do work toward our end responses. After conducting the Harvard Study of Undergraduate Writing,Sommers (2006) realized what teachers say in the comments proves less important than how they sayit. The study revealed that when comments give constructive feedback meant to teach writing skillsfor future writing assignments, students profit most. For students to benefit from feedback, they needto view comments as helpful for future writing, not as individual teachers’ comments about individualassignments.

Other research has attempted to isolate details of comments, such as best placement and wording.In her early study, Sommers’s (1982) 35 teacher participants read and gave feedback to the samethree papers. Whether or not Sommers relied solely on this feedback was unclear in her article, butshe criticized teachers’ comments as too vague and found too much attention to surface errors and notenough to global issues. She instructed teachers to wait until later drafts to attend to these problems,which White’s (1984) article supported. Sommers wanted teachers, responding not as teachers but asgeneral readers, to push their students to work on overall meaning and coherence in drafts. Brannonand Knoblauch (1982) shared this sentiment even as they also designed a study that denied the teacherparticipants the opportunity to do so. Their study, too, asked instructors to read and respond to apreselected essay. They then chastised the teachers’ comments as ignoring author intent and advised“consulting a student writer about what he or she wanted to say before suggesting how he or sheought to say it” (p. 161). Similar research followed, including Dobler and Amoriell’s (1988) study ofcollege elementary education majors responding to high-school students’ writing—students they hadmet once, writing prompts for standardized test preparation. Basing comment success on students’passing or failing the standardized test, the researchers analyzed the comments and categorized them.Their findings supported the use of comments worded positively, as in what to do versus what notto do. They also concluded that commenters should focus on the writing itself instead of commentsmeant only to build rapport. Unfortunately, none of the commenters in Sommers’s (1982), Doblerand Amorielli’s (1988), or Brannon and Knoblauch’s (1982) research had created the assignments, hadinteracted with students throughout the writing processes, or even knew the students whose workthey responded to. Their advice might have been wise, but their methods were flawed.

These flaws in research methods created a distorted view of writing assessment and placed thefull burden for student improvement on writing teachers. Ritter (2012) warned that Sommers’srecommendations were “a heavy pedagogical, and psychological, burden to bear—especially inso-far as comments are often framed as personal correspondence with students” (p. 411). As scholarslooked back at studies of teachers’ comments on student writing, they noted the missing context

Page 4: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

N.L. Baker / Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50 39

surrounding feedback research (Harvey, 2003; Murphy, 2000; Phelps, 2000; Rutz, 2006; Sommers,2006). Rutz (2006) argued that many of these studies ignored student–teacher relationships and class-room or conference interactions: “Without that context, both the atmospherics of the classroom andthe local meanings established in that climate vanish, leaving textual artifacts that reveal only part ofthe communicative story” (p. 257). She asked, as had Murphy (2000) before her, for further inquiry intothe classroom dynamics that created the texts and comments as well as follow-up to what studentsdo with the comments once papers are returned. She reminded the college composition communitythat “real people write student papers, and real people read and comment on them” (p. 260). Harvey(2003), by further acknowledging in a refreshingly honest essay, the emotional complexities associ-ated with responding, joined the growing list of authors willing to humanize teachers as people withemotions, histories, and classroom personalities.

Separating response from the complete act of teaching writing, explained Phelps (2000), eliminatesimportant decisions made by both teachers and students. Teaching writing, in other words, is like chlo-rine in a pool: you can’t separate it from the rest of teaching, you bring something new to it daily, andyou take some of it with you when you go. Rutz (2004) tells us that “A written assignment, there-fore, cheats time and space by representing a teacher’s will—or perhaps intentions—in the teacher’sabsence” (p. 119). In fact, students and teachers mentally reconstruct the classroom through images’created by students’ and teachers’ prior experiences with classroom events and relationships, and thecultural expectations of what rules govern classrooms and their actors function to create predictabil-ity. For her study of this context, Rutz observed four teachers, interviewing them and their students,and conducted a textual analysis of the teachers’ comments on the students’ papers. She found that,indeed, more than the comments themselves determined the paper grading outcome. The instruc-tors validated their comment choices in class, and the students understood the reasons behind theirteachers’ responses. For example, one professor chose formal wording when providing compositionfeedback as well as in-class discussions because he was trying to model what he called “academese”for his students who might otherwise have had little exposure to formal speaking (p. 128). This sameteacher praised sparingly. Yet his students reported a relaxed atmosphere surrounding their instruc-tor. They appeared to genuinely enjoy his class, socially and academically, which complicates Straub’s(1996) idea that students create the teacher in their minds as they read comments. Instead, Rutz’sdata more likely shows that students often construct their teachers’ personae from face-to-face inter-actions and recreate previous interactions when reading comments. Though Batt (2005) is correct inadding that teachers shouldn’t rely on the spoken word to clarify written comments, neither shouldteachers or researchers treat context as a nonentity, relying only on the written word to contain allmeaning. Had she separately analyzed the teachers’ feedback without including context, Rutz wouldhave concluded differently.

Early feedback research gave writing assessment some needed empirical attention and success-fully persuaded many writing teachers to approach writing instruction as both process and product(White, 1984). Study design flaws created an unrealistic picture of what writing teachers do whenthey give feedback, however, and missed the big contextual picture, including emotional aspect ofthe activity. Though plenty of authors have recognized the need to expand the view, actual stud-ies remain sparse, especially on psychological coping tools teachers use to deal with the paperload.

1.2. Activity theory framework

Researching grading as a teaching tool requires us to address responding to writing in a largercontext. This present study aims to continue the qualitative expansion of grading papers Rutz (2004)started to discover writing instructors’ coping strategies for the large and tedious job. This need toget at relevant contextual elements at play for a given activity calls for the use of activity theory asdescribed by Engeström (1999). Activity theory posits that any activity is goal—or object—directed,and it is this object that connects a subject, such as a teacher, to others, such as students and colleagues.Once the researcher has identified the object, he or she can observe the actions, those conscious movessubjects make to accomplish their objectives, and operations, those tacit moves subjects make. Activ-ity theory researchers—when inspecting an activity’s actions, operations, tools, artifacts, community,

Page 5: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

40 N.L. Baker / Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50

and division of labor—can find the source of problems, widening the focus to the subjects’ surround-ings and cultural and historical situatedness. According to Engeström and Miettinen (1999), activitytheory started with the language and educational development work of Russian psychologist Vygotskyand was later advanced by his successor, Leont’ev. The International Society for Cultural and ActivityResearch also credits Luria, Bakhtin, and Rubinshtein. Although these men made their contributions inthe 1920s and 1930s, their application outside of Russia “started in the 1960s, especially by psychol-ogists, educational researchers, and linguists. Subsequently there has been interest from researchersinterested in collective practices from various other disciplines in social and human sciences, as well asphilosophy” (par. 3). Researchers specializing in communication and writing have been using activitytheory as a method and methodology for some time now. Stewart et al.’s (2012) metasynthesis, forinstance, demonstrated the uses of activity theory in several ACM SIGDOC articles related to commu-nication design from 2001 to 2011, and Bazerman and Russell’s (2003) collection of writing studiesusing activity theory supported its usefulness for analyzing writing case studies.

By expanding our view beyond the composition comments themselves or the amount of work tea-chers have to accomplish, we can better understand the activity. It is this understanding that leadsto improvements. Using activity theory, Nagelhout and Blalock (2004) were able to recognize writingclassrooms as dynamic spaces, noting expectations that both teachers and students bring based ontheir past experiences in writing classes and other learning situations. The factors that create a com-munity of learners in any given class have been years in the making. Each first day of the school year orsemester is not a first day at all. Rather, the classroom is like a ski slope with a regular dusting of freshsnow. All skiers who have skied on the snow, depending on the routes they have taken and the tech-niques used, changed the slope so that what it was for the fourth person of the day was not what it wasfor the one hundredth. Even the first skier had a route made possible by previous skiers and weatherpatterns. Similarly, students and teachers, depending on their experiences, come to a classroom thathas already been molded and is even yet being molded. Davydov (1999) says, “In fulfilling the activity,the subjects also change and develop themselves” so that the interactions that take place throughoutthe year make us different teachers from one class to the next (p. 39). In this case, the context extendsbeyond the classroom to the out-of-class grading of out-of-class work. Teachers bring their previousinteractions, concepts, and tool use to the activity, learning these conventions the same way they learnconventions of other genres. Smith (1997) recorded patterns in teachers’ end comments on first-yearcomposition papers and found that different teachers’ comments fit into predictable conventions forthe paper-grading genre.

1.3. Writing productivity

If teachers’ comments follow predictable conventions, making feedback a specific genre, thenshouldn’t these teachers/writers also have writing processes? In DelleBovi’s (2012) curriculumdescription from her course designed, in part, to teach content teachers to assign and assess writ-ing, she said the class “had in depth discussions of this part of the writing process: the labor-intensivetime required to mark papers, the importance of establishing purposes for marking papers, students’responses to written feedback, and conditions under which feedback is valued and ignored” (p. 278).DelleBovi plausibly believes giving feedback involves processes, and if grading papers is writing involv-ing processes, then productivity psychologists’ work pertaining to coping strategies for journal articleand book writing should relate to grading papers as well. Boice, although a psychology professor, hasmade writing his publishing focus, advising academics on teaching and writing, which share charac-teristics. Given these connections, it should come as no surprise that the advice Boice gave writers forproducing academic writing was directly connected to the techniques the three teacher participantshad for coping with paper grading. What’s more, all techniques can be categorized into Engeström’s(1999) activity theory model, as described in Section 3. Though others have recognized feedback writ-ing as writing (Murphy, 2000; Harvey, 2003; Haswell, 2006), none that I know of have extended theimplications of the connection to case studies. By framing commenting with activity theory and pro-ductivity lenses, then, I position it as a writing form and argue that scholars can transfer much of whatwe know about the act of writing to the act of paper responding.

Page 6: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

N.L. Baker / Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50 41

2. Methods

To expand the grading paper view and learn how writing teachers cope with the paper-gradingworkload, I began a qualitative, ethnographic case study of three university writing instructors at aMidwestern United States midsize state university. Researchers conducting ethnographies spend agood amount of time observing and interviewing participants in their natural environments to gainan understanding of their cultures (Creswell, 2009; Blakeslee & Fleischer, 2010). With a rich history asan inquiry method (Tedlock, 2003), ethnography provides more of the missing context in the study ofcoping tools for grading papers described above. The kind of ethnography I describe here as an insiderworking with colleagues who are also friends teaching the same course I was teaching provides acandid view of the instructors’ choices and motivations.

The participants, all English instructors teaching the same first-year conducting research class inmy department, volunteered for the study in spring 2012. I knew the three participants from previousinteractions, described in Section 2.1. Therefore, this study used a convenience sample, and undoubt-edly, my friendships with the participants affected some of the questions I asked and the responseinterpretations to a limited extent. Although I had no strictly-professional interviews to compare, Ifound very little mention of our previous relationships in the transcripts. In my opinion, knowingthese participants made it possible to recruit them—I believe they volunteered to help me with mystudy—but aside from generating some off-topic material, I didn’t see evidence to suggest that ourfriendships influenced the interview data generated for this article. One question I asked Charlie, forexample was, “Do you also find it a compliment that you’re asked to be a mentor every year?” I askedthis question as a follow-up to one of his comments, but had I not been friends with Charlie, I wouldn’thave known he was a mentor to other teachers. Yet, his response didn’t yield new information relatedto the coding. What the participants chose to share or hold back because of our relationships, however,I cannot say.

All participants were interviewed separately in their offices for approximately one hour becauseall of them indicated that they graded at least some of their papers in their offices. During the semi-structured interviews, I asked the instructors questions using activity theory as a heuristic. That is,the questions garnered responses about the teachers’ actions, operations, tools, artifacts, community,and division of labor surrounding the activity of paper grading. One question I asked Brittany, then,was “Can you explain your immediate goal from this activity of grading papers? What’s your imme-diate goal?” followed by “So what would be your bigger, long-term goals?” These areas of inquirycome from Engeström’s (1999, p. 31) activity system model. My questions, as demonstrated by thisexample, responded to the natural conversational direction of the interviews and were not strictlyscripted.

The interviews provided information about their backgrounds, their paper responding and grad-ing processes, and any information they felt could help me situate them socially, historically and,culturally. These three teachers described tools used for their entire writing units, and about waysthey sometimes deviated from these practices, depending on assignments. As they talked, I audiorecorded the conversations and took pictures of artifacts and tools they described to me. The partic-ipants provided me with other artifacts as well, including screen shots and emails sent to students.After interviewing each participant, I stayed and observed as he or she graded at least one paper.During the observations, I asked for clarification about any procedure or tool use not explained to mein the interviews, taking a few notes from these observations.

In fall 2012, I met the teachers again for shorter follow-up interviews in the same locations,recorded in the same manner. In these second interviews, I asked more directed questions relatedto the productivity themes I saw emerging from the initial interviews. Transcriptions include all spo-ken words by the participants and me, but I modified quotes for this article to eliminate repetitionand fillers while maintaining meaning. Coding the interviews consisted of encoding with Engeström’s(1999) activity theory terms, listed above, for the first cycle, followed by a second cycle coded withprevious researchers’ productivity advice for academic writers. Though the larger study employedethnographic techniques, providing me with a better understanding of their teaching cultures, onlythe interviews furnished relevant data for this analysis. I strove to limit the analysis to what could befound only in the data, but my own subjectivity stemming from my previous interactions with the

Page 7: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

42 N.L. Baker / Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50

participants and even more so from my teaching background could have affected examples I choseand my analysis.

2.1. Participants’ background

Annette was a graduate doctoral student with a concentration in rhetoric and composition.Although we did not have classes together, she and I had spent many hours talking throughout theschool year, and we considered each other friends. She had seven years’ experience teaching collegecomposition, but she also had many years’ experience writing commercially before she went back toschool for her doctoral degree. Her experience both as a student and as a writer influenced her teachingbeliefs. For example, she had read composition theory discouraging a focus on mistakes, but she saysoutside of academia, mistakes matter “because everything’s about money and a mistake costs money.Everything’s focused on the mistakes so I still have that hanging in my background. I don’t want themto make mistakes because I know what happens when you make mistakes.”

Brittany was also a graduate student working toward a doctorate in rhetoric and composition. Ofthe three participants, I knew her least but had still spent time with her in gatherings with others,and she and I knew each other well enough to have a relaxed conversation. Brittany was in her fifthyear of teaching first-year college composition and had also taught a digital literacies class. Unlike theother two participants, Brittany had not worked full time between degrees, and she was considerablyyounger than the other two instructors. That her experience came solely from academia was evidentin her heavy reliance on theory from books and articles. She explained, for instance, how she gavefeedback:

There’s an article [that] talked just a little bit about the landscape of the page and what we’redoing when we write ourselves into our students’ papers. And I’m like, yeah, that’s right. That’stheir work, you know. It’s not up to me to go in and just critique all over it.

In the same consistency with composition scholarship on writing feedback, Brittany avoidedaddressing usage and mechanics both in class and in assignment feedback because she wanted tofocus on higher-order writing skills.

Before interviews with Charlie, the third participant, I had already spent many enjoyable hourstalking with him and had observed one of his classes for the entire previous semester. The only full-time instructor of the participants, Charlie had taught high school English for 22 years before going backto school for a doctoral degree in rhetoric and composition. After adding 22 more years’ experienceteaching at the college level, he, like Annette, was still greatly influenced by his experiences withwriting outside of academia. One way he used that experience was by refusing to use rubrics “becausethat’s the way it is in reality. It isn’t a checklist. Nobody’s got a checklist. You do these things and you’regoing to get an A like the student wants. That’s not reality.” Likewise, Charlie wrote on papers andchecked for style, usage, and mechanics, saying papers were “covered with comments. Even an A paperis covered with comments.” These examples demonstrate his break from most recent compositionscholarship. Charlie relied more on his work and teaching experience than on trends in the field.

3. Results

The teachers expressed many outcomes they expected to accomplish by responding to studentwriting. Although each of the participants agreed that they shared the university’s course objectives,they also voiced a genuine desire to help students become better writers and have a positive view ofwriting. Annette wanted “to give them an opportunity where they can really start digging into whattheir interests are.” All the teachers felt students deserved useful comments and fair grades for theirwork. As seen through an activity theory lens, then, the shared object, or goal, of this grading paperactivity was to fairly grade students’ work and to improve their writing. The students most likely, atleast on the surface, shared these same objects and were thus activity actors as well. If I named theobject as the improvement of writing, grading papers would be only one action in a larger activity.Other actions would include in-class lessons, conferences, smaller assignments, and more. Though I do

Page 8: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

N.L. Baker / Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50 43

support an ecological view of these activities within the larger context of improving student writing,focusing on the combined object of producing individual grades for individual assignments to improvestudent writing “corrals” the activity and makes it easier to study (Spinuzzi, 2011). In reality, however,the data resisted clear boundaries.

Meeting their objectives was truly difficult for these three teachers, just as studies on excessiveteacher workload indicated. Charlie, who had taught writing longer than most will ever teach it,explained the difficulty: “And when you got a paper that the average paper is 2500 words, and you’vegot 94 of them, that’s reading several novels over that time and grading those novels. Yeah, it’s kindof crazy.”

Brittany, with only one class said, “Grading 25 papers is nuts” and felt classes should have only 16students. Annette too said,

There’s no getting around the fact that it’s ultimately a tedious thing to do because you’re notreading it for enjoyment. It’s not like you’re just sitting down and reading for enjoyment. You’rereading it and you’re having to make a judgment.

But even though they recognized negative aspects of grading papers, the teachers found a way tofinish the task. The following sections demonstrate techniques and tools these teachers used to managethe process and motivate themselves to accomplish their objectives. While sections are broken byactivity theory terms for ease of reading, obvious and unavoidable overlap occurs.

3.1. Actions and operations

The three participants shared techniques for making their jobs easier, including assigning less workand setting time limits for themselves (Brittany), saving the best class for last (Charlie), and giving andassigning formative feedback in conferences, email, and peer workshops (all). The teachers felt thatgiving this informal formative assessment on students’ progress helped improve the final papers,making grading easier.

Other actions and operations they discussed in more detail concerned managing the process itself.One piece of advice Boice and Jones (1984) gave to writers is to write for a while each day, despitefeeling negatively toward writing. In a study demonstrating the efficacy of this practice, Boice (1985)used three groups of nine professors. All were instructed to keep a log of writing ideas. One group wastold not to write at all, another to write when they felt like writing, and the experiment group—thecontingent group—was instructed to write three pages of text each day and to create punishment forthemselves for not meeting the quota. The group that wrote three pages a day produced much morewriting and ideas for writing than the other two groups. Boice concluded that writers’ creativity andproductivity are improved when people force themselves to write regularly as opposed to writingwhen they feel ready. Annette, Brittany, and Charlie, as feedback writers, practiced this technique intwo ways: by spreading out their grading and by giving themselves deadlines. Annette tried to givegraded papers back within a week, but like Brittany, gave papers back within two weeks at the latest.Charlie, though, had created a rule for himself that he always gave papers back after one week becausehe believed that students needed immediate feedback to benefit from the experience and so that theycould apply the comments as they wrote their next assignments.

Brittany said she would often procrastinate until the last day and grade 22 papers the day beforeher two-week time limit, but as a graduate student with another assistantship duty, she taught onlyone class. Normally, though, she tried to break up the group, grading for a set amount of time, for anhour or so. Charlie, who taught the most classes, said he would procrastinate too, but because he onlygave himself a week to grade four classes’ worth of papers, he could only procrastinate for a few days.After that, he would spend long hours grading. Annette seemed to have the most regimented plansfor breaking up the process. For longer papers, she went through them all twice, looking for differentsurface components such as formatting, MLA documentation, and grammar and mechanics. For thethird round, she read slowly, focusing on content and organization, and during this round, she set agoal of grading five papers per day “because if I don’t, then I have to add five to the next day and so onand so on.” With her consistent and steady process, Annette seemed less bothered by the workload

Page 9: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

44 N.L. Baker / Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50

than Brittany who said her main goal was to “Get it off my stack.” But Charlie, who graded for thelongest stretches and said, only when prompted, that he did not look forward to collecting papers,spent the least time during the interview discussing the task as work or a burden. Charlie’s largerwork load, twice as large as Annette’s and four times as large as Brittany’s, might have kept him in thepaper-grading mindset, just as Boice’s contingency group experienced.

3.2. Tools

Instead of focusing on challenges, Charlie spent time discussing grading papers’ intrinsic rewards.He said he enjoyed seeing compositions his students produced, and he spent the majority of theinterview discussing assignments, reflecting on how well students accomplished assignment goals.He also talked extensively about what he learned from many years of experience: “And so now, I thinkthe class is a course in critical thought and reading.” Charlie’s ability to focus on student learningkept him engaged and working hard after 44 years. In his explanation of why he hadn’t experiencedburnout, Charlie said, “I enjoy the whole act of teaching and having students learn how to improvetheir writing.” He mentioned that he won the university’s excellence in teaching award, which, alongwith improvements he had seen in his students’ writing, reinforced his belief that he no longer neededto question whether or not he was a good teacher: “I do a job, and I do it very well, thank you verymuch.” Furthermore, Charlie felt rewarded when other instructors asked for advice, saying that “whencolleagues stick their head in the door and say, ‘Hey, [Charlie], what do you think?’ that’s a reward.And I appreciate that. It humbles me.” Thus, being a good teacher and receiving recognition from hiscolleagues is a psychological tool Charlie relied on as motivation.

Based on his study, Boice (1995) also advised teachers to “use contingency management,” some kindof punishment, to motivate themselves (p. 44). The instructors in this study didn’t punish themselves,but Annette and Brittany did give themselves rewards for finishing part or all of their paper-gradinggoals. Charlie, on the other hand, insisted, “Just getting them done is a good feeling. Don’t go out andhave a beer,” again returning to intrinsic rewards. Annette, though, rewarded herself: “I’ll say, okayI’m going to do so many papers and then after I get this one done, I’m going to go for a walk,” andif family members walked with her, they would stop at Starbucks. Brittany also had what she called“micro-rewards.” She would tell herself, “No Twitter until you finish this paper!” or she would makeherself work for an hour before she could have tea.

3.3. Community and rules

Although successful teachers sometimes need to prioritize work over other activities, according toBoice (1995), they should learn to manage criticism of their work: “They anticipate criticism becausenothing, beyond regular work, affects new faculty as much as how efficiently they deal with crit-icism” (p. 52). This criticism can come from different areas of teachers’ communities: coworkers,administrators, students, and authors of articles and books. Sommers’ (1982) article, for example, iscriticism of teachers’ feedback. Both graduate assistants expressed concern about receiving criticism.Annette, especially, made many references to criticism she received from students. Describing whatshe thought about when commenting, Annette said she chose words carefully because she didn’twant to accidentally “write something that isn’t perceived in the spirit that you meant it. So I alwayshave to consciously become positive when I write those comments so that I can encourage them andnot deflate them.” Annette concentrated on preventing students’ misinterpretations, which probablyimproved how her comments were received, but she said the concentration exhausted her.

Another example shows that Annette had developed a regular way of anticipating complaints:“They will constantly challenge. If they don’t understand why they got a certain grade, they will wantto know why. And they may talk to me about it and we may negotiate something depending onwhat it is.” Several examples show that Annette directed a large amount of energy thinking aboutstudents’ criticisms of either her teaching or grading. She mentioned that one advantage to havinglibrary workshops was to reinforce what she was telling students and that she referred students toher blog site for class information so that students wouldn’t misquote her or so that she wouldn’t makea mistake. She also passed back papers at the end of class to prevent grade sharing among students and

Page 10: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

N.L. Baker / Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50 45

to force students to look through all comments before complaining. She had considered the criticism,making changes to her assignments and syllabus, and she tried to “discuss all the assignments inclass so they have a chance to make their complaints to me directly so I can explain.” To deal withthe criticism, Annette said she would journal or talk with other instructors or the writing programdirector.

Brittany, too, said she worried about criticism, “I want to justify why I’m giving them the grade Idid, so I sort of go overboard in my explanation because it makes me feel better, because I worry thatthey’re going to get mad at me,” which is also one reason she wanted to return papers quickly. Butshe, like Annette, anticipated students’ complaints and tried to encourage students to voice concernsin class so that she could clarify assignment objectives. Negative student evaluations, though, wouldget her down. In Brittany’s words,

When I got some, I mean they weren’t bad scores, but I got some feedback, including negativefeedback on one of my evals, and I just went and sat in [my professor’s] office, and cried, andthen he’s like, “This is why you’re stupid. And this is why these are good, and stop worrying.” Itend to vent to someone and have them debrief with me.

Although both women worried about students’ complaints, they coped by turning to others forencouragement. Charlie, on the other hand, spent no time during the first interview discussing whatstudents thought of his teaching or comments, but he alluded to administrative criticism he receivedrecently about one or more assignment. He felt his experience and awards spoke for themselvesin responding to that criticism. He declared that he wouldn’t give in to administrative pressure tocreate what he believed would be ineffective assignments. When I asked specifically about criticismin the follow-up interview, Charlie shared that he too was susceptible to some worry about negativeevaluations such as after the previous semester:

And it wasn’t that many. The majority of the evaluations were very good as they usually are,but that doesn’t mean that you don’t take it personal when some of those students that you’vetried to have them do a better job come back and bite you. That’s life, man.

From Charlie’s perspective, he couldn’t help but take negative feedback personally, but he felt stu-dents were complaining because he had high standards. Just as with administrator criticism, therefore,Charlie refused to change writing assignments based on feedback, and ended this discussion with anindication that he had moved on.

Dealing with criticism is just one way that communities play a role in teachers’ paper-grading prac-tices. Simply interacting and venting with other instructors while commenting, according to Brittany,brings them together “to bond” because grading is what writing teachers have in common—“the greatleveler,” as she called it. She said she complained about grading in general, never in response to aspecific paper, on Twitter and was even invited to join a G-chat to commiserate with others. Or if sheran into a new issue while responding that left her stumped, she would ask somebody, “Help, what doI do with this?” Annette also reported asking others for advice. When I observed her, she turned to memore than once to describe what she saw on papers and to narrate past interactions with students. Asfor Charlie, he said he garners new ideas from colleagues, but he doesn’t talk to them about gradingpapers “because I think most of them go in different directions than I do, and I’m very comfortablewith how I go about doing my assessment.”

Just as Boice (1993) encouraged teachers to meet with each other about academic writing to learnhow academic writing looks, teachers often do the same for comments. Responding’s social and cul-tural construction has created genre expectations. Rules, one of activity theory’s examined areas,keep teachers and students following these genre expectations. All of the participants, for instance,discussed checking sources and having certain page length as well as guidelines imposed by the writ-ing program or the university. And of course, students expect grades to be assigned to their papers.Brittany said she liked the portfolio system best, but she couldn’t wait until after midterms beforegiving grades because the students would not accept waiting. Annette understood that she neededto comment thoroughly in a reasonable time, identifying areas for improvement, “but I also have tosomehow compliment or encourage something else that they did right. And my other rule is that I

Page 11: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

46 N.L. Baker / Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50

don’t get too crazy with the marking on the actual paper itself,” which is what we saw earlier withBrittany considering student writing a landscape. Charlie clearly communicated that he was not asconcerned about recent genre changes as the less-experienced teachers because he was still seeingwriting improvement by following many of the older commenting methods, including writing hisfeedback on hardcopies.

3.4. Division of labor

On a more pragmatic level, Boice (1995) encouraged teachers to “Let others do some of the work”when writing (p. 54). Annette, Brittany, and Charlie had all developed systems that shared gradingpaper work with their students. Annette and Charlie said that on the day they collected final paperdrafts, they gave students time to look over their papers and make changes with pen or pencil. Theyreminded students to check for paper headings and such formatting concerns. Annette required stu-dents to label and staple their drafts and include in the folder their marked and final drafts and onepage printed from each source. This last step, Annette said, wasn’t only about plagiarism but ratherwas a way to understand students’ choices: “I go to the source to try to figure out what it is they weretrying to incorporate and what the issue was, why it didn’t happen the way it should have.” Charliealso had these routines when collecting papers. For the first time, he had collected the last set of papersin alphabetical order because they were long papers, and he knew this step would save him time. Herequired headings and brought a stapler to class, but he was clear that the reasons for demanding cer-tain formats were to improve the process, not because he believed in arbitrary expectations: “There’sno busy work that should be involved in a good writing class. Everything should have a reason forcomplimenting the writing that you want.” This belief was evident with all the participants. Brittanyinstructed her students to create a Dropbox account, creating a shared folder with assignment sub-folders within. For each assignment, students would upload their Word documents into the folder sothat she could access it easily. Thus, the teachers resourcefully shared work with students to maketheir jobs of grading papers easier.

4. Discussion

The teachers who participated in this study had much more to share about the job of respondingto and grading student compositions, especially the process and physical tools involved. But evenfrom this brief summary of their techniques for staying motivated and handling the workload, writingdepartments and researchers learn lessons for the benefit of teachers and students connected to thepaper-grading activity.

4.1. Rewards

First, newer teachers might need extra incentives to mentally get through the place where theyfeel overwhelmed, which my experienced colleagues and I agree gets easier over time. Althoughmost departments and universities have large awards for outstanding teaching and other accom-plishments, few teachers receive large awards. Charlie brought up, in both the initial and follow-upinterviews, the large award he received, but he also mentioned the merit committee in the depart-ment that recognizes teachers for outstanding teaching. Not only do the recipients receive a bit morepay, but they get the reward of acknowledgment. All of the teachers said extra pay was especiallyappreciated. When asked about external rewards that would make the job more enjoyable, Annetteexplained

Well, I don’t really think there’s any way to make it more enjoyable. And to be honest with you,the only way you’re going to make people happier is to give them more compensation becausethey’ve got a huge job. And, you know, money is all I can think of because, especially when youconsider that a lot of instructors are not full-time instructors and don’t have benefits, it’s almosta joke to get any kind of a compensation that’s not money, especially if you don’t have benefits.

Page 12: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

N.L. Baker / Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50 47

It would seem, therefore, that bonuses and recognition for outstanding teaching were the onlyexternal rewards these teachers would appreciate. If departments have no bonus money, which islikely the case, administrators should focus on showing public appreciation, even when instructorslike Brittany have a smaller workload. Although workload mattered to all of the teachers, of the threeparticipants, Charlie—with the largest class load—appeared to experience the most intrinsic rewardsand the least angst. From this small case study, a cause for these differences is out of reach; yet, futurestudies might focus on writing teacher efficacy and its relationship to age, gender, years of experience,and employment status. On the other hand, Annette spoke to Ritter’s (2012) argument that perhapsit’s time to ask ourselves if this “labor-intensive” activity is fair to our teachers and our students in lightof the hiring practices it helps create (p. 412). Sure, we could continue to look for intrinsic rewardsbecause higher pay isn’t available, but Ritter explained that “affective and empathy-laden” caretakingassociated with women is what tethers the position to its low pay (p. 404). But for those who stillvalue the profession as it currently stands, awards seem easy to implement.

4.2. Criticism

What the teachers in this study have in common with other actors in the paper-grading activity isthe shared object of student learning and assigning grades, which can provide the intrinsic rewards.When researchers, however, forget these objects or replace them with personal publishing goals, theycreate unhelpful tension. Creating new genre elements for feedback muddles the task unless the newgenre elements work as realistic tools to best meet the object of student learning and assigning grades.Not only do teachers need practical and flexible advice that recognizes them as real people with limitedtime and resources, but they need to know that teaching methods will help students transfer learningto later writing situations. Haswell (2006) describes the negative result of attempting to standardizeresponses:

Standards have a way either of over-regulating or under-regulating teacher response to writing.They over-regulate when they force teachers to focus their response on a limited number ofwriting traits, excluding traits the teachers know are important and highlighting traits theyknow are inconsequential or even vitiating. This bind is not trivial. (para. 14)

By over-sifting feedback to what is essentially the Ideal Response, writing researchers invalidateand de-professionalize teachers’ own judgment. Instead, researchers should honor and recognize tea-chers’ past experiences, persuading teachers to change their practices based on reality—not judgingthem into making changes. Annette couldn’t ignore mistakes, for example, when her life experiencetold her mistakes matter, and Charlie couldn’t create rubrics if he hadn’t seen rubrics in writing pro-duced outside of educational institutions. In addition, if researchers and authors of articles and bookson these subjects keep criticism to a minimum, teachers can focus less time on self-scrutiny and minutedetails of responses and more time on noticing student learning and enjoying the experience. Char-lie’s ability to block out what he perceived to be unhelpful advice may have contributed to his focuson student improvement, which rewarded and sustained him through each stack. Administrators tooshould be mindful of the difficult job teachers have to do and should take care to show compassionand respect and support instructors when students complain, unless legitimate problems exist. BothAnnette and Brittany received support from writing program directors and professors, which theymight need less of as they continue teaching and grading, as Charlie’s interviews could be showing us.

4.3. Responding communities

Annette, Brittany, and Charlie presumably learned teaching tools from research, trial and error,years as students, and from other teachers when they sought advice. Boice (1993) says, “The explana-tion I favor is that writing fluency is a kind of practical intelligence whose basics remain traditionallyuntaught” and tacit (p. 20). In other words, academic writing is too often treated as an individualactivity we should already know how to do. But can we say the same of feedback as writing? Shouldadministrators provide more opportunities for communication between experienced instructors and

Page 13: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

48 N.L. Baker / Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50

those newer to the job? Rutz and Lauer-Glebov (2005) documented how community-focused facultydevelopment can breed better writing projects and assessments. Before implementing their new port-folio system, Carleton College’s teachers “worked autonomously in their classrooms, rarely consultingone another about writing pedagogy” (p. 83). But they saw positive changes after creating a new sys-tem that brought teachers together “to share assignments, to compare experiences, and to learn howto create better writing assignments. Incentives in the form of stipends, course development grants,and abundant good food have helped strengthen and maintain participation” (p. 90). Would such anincrease in discussions and sharing teaching strategies improve technique and morale on a smallerscale? The three instructors in this study did express a genuine interest in gatherings, especially withstipends and food. Brittany said that “if it were in any way financially supportive, I’d be all over thatlike white on rice. And even just to have food, something that says, ‘We recognize that you’re takingtime out of your day, so here’s a donut.”’ Yet, Annette and Brittany already sought advice and sup-port, face-to-face and/or through social media. They didn’t rely on their writing program to organizeteachers for a scheduled gathering. Rather, they consulted with experienced instructors they felt com-fortable talking with, or they simply vented to Twitter followers. While Charlie said he would supportdepartment-organized meetings if they were positive, he also said he was only looking for assignmentideas, which he already collected when reviewing material on the teacher merit committee. He saw hisrole as more of an advice giver, not a receiver, and others—including me—came to him for that advice.These teachers, therefore, participated in informal feedback communities they created for themselvesor that were created organically through contacts and friendships. Their experiences suggest that per-haps opportunities for socializing in general, to build friendships or mentoring relationships, are atleast as important as structured events with staff-development agendas.

5. Conclusion

Though the activity theory methods provided a widened paper-grading view, the limited scope ofthis study—only three writing instructors at the university level—make generalizability to all writ-ing feedback impossible. Future work needs to include secondary English/language arts teachers whousually have more students and spend more time with them in class as well as WAC instructors whohaven’t pursued Ph.Ds. in rhetoric and composition. How new instructors cope with paper gradingand how responding communities initially form and develop also remain unexplored. Additionally,an area I collected data on but chose not to include here is equally interesting and important: the reg-ulated way the teachers processed the work and the physical tools they employed for the task, such assending comments by email, creating rubrics, or using their own percentage-conversion charts. Thisfocus alone would provide for an extensive discussion, which I believe deserves its own treatment withperhaps either a self-regulation lens or what Fleckenstein (2012) calls an “eco-cognitive paradigm”framework that considers the physical space, physical tool use, and the body (p. 91). A complete eco-logical understanding of writing assignment assessment should include some kind of rich descriptionof teacher processes and tool use, which feedback researchers still need to take up.

Broad (2000) argues against absolute reliability in standardized writing assessment because lan-guage is too complex to be narrowed down to objective analyses of measurable moves. Teachers, too,are complex, and words they write on students’ papers shouldn’t be analyzed in isolation. To fullyunderstand paper grading, researchers must ecologically broaden their view to include context, pos-sibly using activity theory methodology. Such a context, as Annette, Brittany, and Charlie have shown,complicates matters. They show us that teachers are writers working within a feedback genre, andjust as writers of other genres have multiple processes depending on each job and their past expe-riences, teachers, too, develop processes for completing and coping with paper-grading tasks. Usingprevious research on writers by Boice and others, combined with the words of Annette, Brittany, andCharlie, we see that what helps other writers produce regularly very well might be the same tools thathelp teachers produce helpful responses to papers while also maintaining long-term motivation andfulfillment. They must motivate themselves to complete the cycle repeatedly, to assign and teach thenext assignment, once again devoting large chunks of time. But they need not work alone; we’re all inthis together.

Page 14: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

N.L. Baker / Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50 49

References

Batt, T. A. (2005). The rhetoric of the end comment. Rhetoric Review, 24(2), 207–223.Bazerman, C., & Russell, D. R. (2003). Writing selves/writing societies. , retrieved from http://wac.colostate.edu/books/

selves societies/Blakeslee, A., & Fleischer, C. (2010). Becoming a writing researcher. New York: Routledge.Boice, R. (1985). The neglected third factor in writing: Productivity. College Composition and Communication, 36(4), 472–480.Boice, R. (1993). Writing blocks and tacit knowledge. The Journal of Higher Education, 64(1), 19–54.Boice, R. (1995). Writerly rules for teachers. The Journal of Higher Education, 66(1), 32–60.Boice, R., & Jones, F. (1984). Why academicians don’t write. The Journal of Higher Education, 55(5), 567–582.Brannon, L., & Knoblauch, C. H. (1982). On students’ right to their own texts: A model of teacher response. College Composition

and Communication, 33(2), 157–166.Broad, B. (2000). Pulling your hair out: Crises of standardization in communal writing assessment. Research in the Teaching of

English, 35(2), 213–260.Clark, B. R. (1997). Small worlds, different worlds: The uniqueness and troubles of American academic professions. Daedalus,

126(4), 21–42.Creswell, J. W. (2009). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches. Los Angeles: SAGE.Davydov, V. V. (1999). The content and unsolved problems of activity theory. In Y. Engeström, R. Miettinen, & R. L. Punamäki

(Eds.), Perspectives on activity theory (pp. 39–52). New York: Cambridge University Press.DeCarlo, L. T. (2005). A model of rater behavior in essay grading based on Signal Detection Theory. Journal of Educational

Measurement, 42(1), 53–76.DelleBovi, B. M. (2012). Literacy instruction: From assignment to assessment. Assessing Writing, 17, 271–292.Dobler, J. M., & Amoriell, W. J. (1988). Comments on writing: features that affect student performance. Journal of Reading, 32(3),

214–223.Easthope, C., & Easthope, G. (2000). Intensification, extension and complexity of teachers’ workload. British Journal of Sociology

of Education, 21(1), 43–58.Engeström, Y. (1999). Activity theory and individual and social transformation. In Y. Engeström, R. Miettinen, & R. L. Punamäki

(Eds.), Perspectives on activity theory (pp. 19–38). New York: Cambridge University Press.Engeström, Y., & Miettinen, R. (1999). Introduction. In Y. Engeström, R. Miettinen, & R. L. Punamäki (Eds.), Perspectives on activity

theory (pp. 1–16). New York: Cambridge University Press.Fleckenstein, K. (2012). Reclaiming the mind: Eco-cognitive research in writing studies. In L. Nickoson, & M. P. Sheridan (Eds.),

Writing studies research in practice: Methods and methodologies (pp. 86–97). Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.Golub, J. N. (Ed.). (2005). More ways to handle the paper load: On paper and online. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of

English.Harvey, G. (2003). Repetitive strain: The injuries of responding to student writing. ADE Bulletin, 134-135, 43–48.Haswell, R. (2006). The complexities of responding to student writing; or, looking for shortcuts via the road of excess. Across

the Disciplines, 3, retrieved from http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/articles/haswell2006.cfmHuot, B. (2002). Toward a new discourse of assessment for the college writing classroom. College English, 65(2), 163–180.International Society for Cultural and Activity Research. (2013). About ISCAR. , retrieved from http://www.iscar.org/en/aboutMurphy, S. (2000). A sociocultural perspective on teacher response: Is there a student in the room? Assessing Writing, 7(1),

79–90.Nagelhout, E., & Blalock, G. (2004). Spaces for the activity of writing instruction. In E. Nagelhout, & C. Rutz (Eds.), Classroom

spaces and writing instruction (pp. 133–151). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.NCTE. (1987). Statement on class size and teacher workload: College. , retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/

classsizecollegeNCTE. (1990). Statement on class size and teacher workload: Secondary. , retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/positions/classsizePhelps, L. W. (2000). Cyrano’s nose: Variations on the theme of response. Assessing Writing, 7(1), 91–110.Ritter, K. (2012). Ladies who don’t know us correct our papers: Postwar lay reader programs and twenty-first century contingent

labor in first-year writing. College Composition and Communication, 63(3), 387–419.Rutz, C. (2004). Marvelous cartographers. In E. Nagelhout, & C. Rutz (Eds.), Classroom spaces and writing instruction (pp. 117–132).

Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.Rutz, C. (2006). Recovering the conversation: a response to “Responding to student writing” via “Across the drafts”. College

Composition and Communication, 58(2), 257–262.Rutz, C., & Lauer-Glebov, J. (2005). Assessment and innovation: One darn thing leads to another. Assessing Writing, 10(2), 80–99.Smith, S. (1997). The genre of the end comment: Conventions in teacher responses to student writing. College Composition and

Communication, 48(2), 249–268.Sommers, N. (1982). Responding to student writing. College Composition and Communication, 33(2), 148–156.Sommers, N. (2006). Across the drafts. College Composition and Communication, 58(2), 248–257.Spinuzzi, C. (2011). Losing by expanding: Corralling the runaway object. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 25(4),

449–486.Stewart, J. L., Baker, N. L., Chaney, S. E., Hashimov, E., Imafuji, E. L., McNely, B., & Romano, L. (2012). A qualitative metasynthesis of

activity theory in SIGDOC Proceedings 2001–2011. In Proceedings from SIGDOC ‘12: Proceedings of the 30th annual conferenceon design of communication. New York: ACM.

Straub, R. (1996). The concept of control in teacher response: Defining the varieties of “directive” and “facilitative” commentary.College Composition and Communication, 47(2), 223–251.

Tedlock, B. (2003). Ethnography and ethnographic representation. In N. K. Denzin, & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Strategies of qualitativeinquiry (2nd ed., pp. 165–213). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

White, E. M. (1984). Post-structural literary criticism and the response to student writing. College Composition and Communica-tion, 35(2), 186–195.

White, E. M. (1994). Teaching and assessing writing (2nd ed.). Porland, ME: Calendar Islands Publishers.

Page 15: “Get it off my stack”: Teachers’ tools for grading papers

50 N.L. Baker / Assessing Writing 19 (2014) 36–50

White, E. M. (2007). Assigning, responding, evaluating: A writing teacher’s guide (4th ed.). Boston/NY: Bedford/St. Martin’s.Williams, L. F. (1980). Toward a realistic teacher workload. The English Journal, 69(5), 9–11.

Nicki Litherland Baker is a doctoral student at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where she studies rhetoric andcomposition, focusing on writing pedagogy. Drawing on her experience teaching both middle-school language arts and first-year college composition, she has recently researched student empirical studies, writing self-regulation, and online writinginstruction.