Moving beyond the Written Comment: Narrowing the Gap between Response Practice and Research

While our field’s response practices have changed dramatically over the past two decades to involve more student comments on their own texts, empirical studies have lagged far behind classroom practices, focusing almost exclusively on teachers’ written comments as texts. By broadening our notion of response—and acknowledging the many and varied ways that teachers respond to student writing as well as the many and varied ways that students influence and interpret those responses—we will be able to narrow the gap between our teaching practices and our research questions.