What are narrative report card comments?
Narrative report card comments are pieces of written feedback prepared for the benefit of students and families. These comments are generated by teachers several times a year. Most schools choose to send home narrative comments between two and four times a year. They generally coincide with number grades being sent home to parents. They are especially common among charter schools and independent schools.
Narrative report card comments are meant to inform parents of their child’s progress during the school year. These reports generally relay qualitative feedback to parents to supplement the quantitative feedback shown by numeric grades. This qualitative feedback can be critically important to painting a complete picture of a child’s learning landscape. By itself, a number grade does little to address why the student received the grades they did in their classes. A good narrative comment can do wonders here - for example:
- “Jason has shown a great degree of diligence in completing his homework, but is struggling to do well on tests.”
- “Sun Jung has a very strong grasp on the material we’ve covered this year. Keep up the strong performance!”
- “Cherise demonstrates excellent number sense, but tries to do too much in her head. Taking more time to show her work would pay dividends in her quiz scores!”
- “Ramon clearly applies himself to his work in a way he did not during the previous semester. The quality of his work has improved dramatically. Great job!”
- “Mehdi has had trouble turning in his homework assignments with regularity.”
Report card comments like these allow parents to see the rest of the picture. They tell a story that is hard to relay based on a number grade alone. A good report card comment can be strong positive feedback to a student’s good learning habits. They can also be incredibly helpful when it comes to informing parents of how their child is struggling in school. A well chosen comment can offer helpful suggestions for an action plan to help a struggling student get back on track.
Narrative report card comments are generally the responsibility of the student’s teacher to generate. In the case of a school where students switch classrooms or rotate teachers throughout the day, the responsibility of these comments typically falls to a “homeroom” teacher. This teacher is responsible for helping to guide the child’s complete learning profile in areas adjacent to academic performance. Things like social-emotional learning, classroom citizenship, and personal growth are typically the responsibility of a homeroom teacher to monitor and report on.
Report card comments are incredibly useful tools for teachers, students, and parents. They can be powerful reinforcement for high performing pupils, as well as essential tools for helping struggling students. However, they can be challenging to create. Many teachers report that crafting narrative comments is extremely time consuming. A typical teacher is responsible for fifteen to sixty students in a given school year. A normal narrative report requires anywhere from twenty to sixty minutes to craft. Many teachers also report needing to reference notes, grades, or other supplementary material to generate reports for their students. This material has been shown to have great impacts: by personalizing their comments to individual students, teacher feedback is more likely to have a positive impact. This does come with the tradeoff of time, however. A normal teacher generally expects to spend 15 to 30 hours generating narrative report card feedback. This can be even higher for a specialist teacher; teachers who oversee art, music, or foreign language generally teach many students across several grades in a given school. This makes the burden of report card comments correspondingly more challenging.