Asao B. Inoue's Infrequent Words

Teachers of all stripes who assign peer review or peer assessments often complain that students don't know how to give helpful feedback, if they give much at all. Even when we structure feedback by providing rubrics or other heuristics to guide student assessors and what they offer their colleagues, student feedback is often less than helpful, or perceived as such by writers. To complicate matters further, many students just don't trust their peers for a variety of good reasons, (e.g., their peers aren't grading them, their peers aren't experts in writing or the topic of the class, etc.). I have found, however, that there are practices that students can do that provide helpful feedback, and that can encourage a deeper attention to that feedback by writers. Good Feedback Starts with Good Reading Every act of judgment must proceed from an act of reading or listening. One measure of the thoughtfulness and helpfulness of any judgment of a text is the quality of the pract...

The title page to The Lay Folks Mass Book  (1879). Today, teachers and students understand a rubric as a set of expectations for a written assignment, often thought of as a grading or scoring guide, but the word has a long history in the Catholic Church’s liturgical practices. It has stayed close to its original Middle English and French meanings, even today. The first appearance of the word was a reference to directions for church services and how they should be conducted. These references were usually in red letters, much like a heading. In the Lay Folks’ Mass Book (ca. 1300-1400 B.C.E.), one of the first uses of the term was to the church services (I’ve emphasized the word in red for ease, which is not necessarily the way the original text displayed the word): “Þo robryk is gode vm while to loke, þo praiers to con with-outen boke.” In 1563, the term was used similarly by John Foxe in Acts and Monuments : “The whole Canon of the Masse with the Rubrick therof, as it stan...