Sentence-Level Evaluations and Feedback: Measuring Writing Growth
Here, we prompt ChatGPT to look carefully at each sentence in a student’s essay, so that it can clearly pinpoint specific mistakes, offer direct explanations, and provide concrete examples for revision. Using this structured sentence-level feedback consistently—from the very first baseline essay at the start of the year and throughout subsequent assignments—allows you to easily measure if students are improving, actively applying your previous advice, and making fewer errors. This is more of a “micro” tack on evaluation, because the other prompts in this chapter were broader in their perspective on essay evaluation.
Leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT can make this process efficient, helping you quickly identify common error types and their frequency. Most importantly, it allows you to quantitatively track your students’ growth as writers. Now you can literally count whether students are making fewer mistakes over time, clearly demonstrating how much they've grown as thoughtful, precise, and effective writers.
A) Prompt for Effective Sentence-by-Sentence Evaluation Method
Upload student anonymized writing/essays and enter the following prompt:
Prompt:
“Review this student’s essay closely, sentence-by-sentence, identifying grammatical, punctuation, and diction errors clearly. For each problematic sentence, explain the error and provide a clear, corrected rewrite. Conclude by suggesting specific daily strategies (reading newspapers, grammar exercises) that students can use to improve their writing. Each problematic sentence should be systematically analyzed through the following structured approach:
Clearly label the original sentence.
Explicitly identify the grammatical or structural issue.
Explain the error clearly and briefly.
Provide a revised sentence demonstrating correct usage.”
B) Revised Draft Comparisons: Clearly Tracking an Individual Student’s Writing Progress Over Time
Evaluating student essays by directly comparing revised drafts to earlier versions is especially beneficial for tracking progress quantitatively, clearly identifying improvements, and recognizing areas needing ongoing attention. This method is particularly valuable for specific student populations—such as students with disabilities (SWDs)—who benefit significantly from clearly documented, incremental feedback, enabling concrete visualization of their own growth over time.
Prompt:
"Using the provided rubric, carefully evaluate the student's revised essay by explicitly comparing it with their previous draft. Clearly highlight specific improvements in areas such as clarity, organization, evidence integration, grammar, and mechanics. Explicitly address whether previously identified issues (e.g., sentence fragments, weak evidence integration, or unclear structure) have improved, using clear, direct examples from both drafts. Identify any remaining areas needing revision, provide specific, manageable next steps for further improvement, and maintain an encouraging tone that clearly acknowledges the student's progress and motivates continued growth."