Secondary Comments for Formal Reports

Purpose: Using strength-based and accessible language to clearly describe the student’s strengths, areas of growth, and strategies that will support growth in relation to a course’s specific learning standards.

Audience: Your primary audience is the student; your secondary audience is the student’s parents/caregivers. (Aim for your writing to be for someone with a grade 8 reading level and no background in education or the subject area)

Comments SHOULD be: concise (short and to the point), clear and specific, use parent-friendly language, use direct sentences and/or bullet points.

Comments SHOULD NOT: summarize the learning standards or unit or lesson plans, use edu-jargon, use complex sentences (e.g., run on, multiple clauses, etc.).

The 3 Required Parts in a Comment:

  1. Student strengths
  2. Areas of future growth
  3. Strategies to support growth

Suggested to include: Student Work/Learning Habits

Tech Tips to make comment writing/copy and pasting into MyED easier:

  • use dashes (-) instead of formatted bullets
  • “Paste Special” if things are pasting from Word strangely or not at all (on a MAC press: control, command, v – all at once)

paste-special.38996c8881.png

Please click on the following links for subject-area specific sample comments:

Notes:

  • These comments are provided as examples and do not encompass all of the competencies or content in a course that are reported on.
  • These comments are meant to be used as examples for all courses in their subject area.