Left to their own devices, students typically don’t revise their essays in meaningful ways. A few may tweak the wording or clarify an idea or two, but without guidance and feedback, edits tend to be superficial. In response, teachers often spend hours delivering corrections and encouragement on first drafts.

That time might be better spent investing in rubrics and exemplars, 2023 research suggests. In a new study, high school students wrote an essay analyzing a literary passage and were graded on the precision, focus, and organization of their final draft. While revising, one group of students was simply asked to improve their essays, while another group received a rubric defining crucial elements such as cohesiveness and the importance of making a central claim. A third group received examples of outstanding student work, and a fourth received both a rubric and exemplars.

Compared to the revision-only students, whose scores barely budged, students who consulted a rubric scored a half-letter grade higher on their revised drafts, while exemplars boosted scores by a third of a letter grade. Surprisingly, students who received both a rubric and exemplars performed only marginally better than the revision-only students, which the researchers attribute to the “significant cognitive load” of monitoring two standards simultaneously.

For teachers, individualized feedback can be too time-consuming, the researchers concluded. They might be better off distributing rubrics or exemplars to help students “generate self-feedback and improve performance”—resulting in a more efficient and productive learning experience.