Empower students to submit their best work with NoRedInk's new review support for writing assignments!
Before students submit their first draft, they'll see:
- a checklist for reviewing their work, including a lesson on citing sources
- a tool that highlights any text they pasted into their assignment, helping them self-assess their work for originality and proper citation before submission
If students haven’t pasted any text, they can still use the checklist to review their work before submission.
Understanding What Teachers See
As students review, they can make changes to their work before submission. Teachers will see only the final version of the student's writing after they submit.
Previewing the Student Experience
Teachers can explore exactly what their students will see by navigating to the Guided Essay or Quick Write Library and selecting Preview on any of the premade prompts. For assignments created after January 29, 2025, teachers can also preview directly from any Guided Essay or Quick Write assigned to students in grades 6 and above.
Teachers can also access the lesson on citations here at any time.
Understanding NoRedInk's Pasted Text Detection
Pasted text highlights can help students identify text that should have citations, such as quotes they pasted into their assignment from sources, to make sure they have been cited correctly. The highlights don't necessarily mean that students need to change something.
NoRedInk detects all text that is pasted into the NoRedInk editor. Examples include but are not limited to:
- Text from other websites
- Text from NoRedInk prompts
- Text from passages within NoRedInk assignments
Pasted text does not include text that the student wrote in the current assignment and then cut and pasted into a different paragraph or part of the assignment.
If a student starts drafting their assignment in another tool, or even another assignment within NoRedInk, and then pastes that draft into their current NRI assignment, the entire draft will be highlighted as pasted text.
If this is common practice in your classroom and you are concerned about students getting confused by the pasted text highlighting in review support, you can advise them to hide the paste highlighting by selecting the toggle in the top right corner of their screen.
Grade Level Availability
Students in grades 6+ will see review support on Guided Essay and Quick Write assignments that were created after Jan 29, 2025. Students below Grade 6 will not see review support on their assignments.
Although we know elementary students also benefit from reviewing their writing, students in grades 3-5 will not see our review support. We want to ensure we don't confuse younger students with the pasted text highlights or the guidance on citations, which was designed for students in grades 6+.
Best Practices
Help students get the most out of NoRedInk’s review support with the following best practices:
- Project the review checklist ahead of time to set student expectations for the assignment. Use this opportunity to remind students where to find the prompt and rubric. If they refer to these while they write, they’ll likely need to make fewer changes as they review.
- Help students use highlighted text to spot where they need citations. Explain that the highlights can help with prioritizing what to review, but students should still double-check all of their writing. Also, highlights don’t necessarily mean they need to change something. For example, they may have already cited a pasted quote, or they may have pasted text that doesn’t need a citation.
- Offer students specific strategies for catching errors in their work. For example, students can read their work out loud and listen for mistakes. Or, they can read through their work multiple times, focusing on one type of error each time.
- Pre-teach the rules and format your students should follow when citing sources. Try projecting the lesson on citing sources, giving students a chance to ask questions. You may also want to assign practice topics on evidence, citations, and plagiarism before students begin writing.
- Keep the review lightweight. This step is meant to be relatively quick, helping students develop a habit of reviewing their work. For a more thorough guided revision process, check out Self Review assignments.
For more support with fostering student accountability and academic integrity, see NoRedInk Originality Insights for teachers.