few internet links.
Here are the things I learned from you with some suggestions from me.
- If you have to grade work by 200 students you will feel overwhelmed and you need to ask your fellow TAs and the professor of the class what strategies they propose you use. Don't try to figure it out on your own and make the same mistakes all those other people made. Ask questions.
- Many of you use rubrics and you find that your grading of lab reports is still subjective. Yes there is a subjective element to a rubric. However, if the criteria and standards are clearly written with no ambiguity, both the students and you should know exactly what good performance looks like. The rubric template puts the standards in terms of beginning, developing, accomplished, and exemplary. If you set your rubric up like this, you can help students identify where their work fits and show them what they need to do to move to a higher level of performance. This is easier to interpret and use than a rubric than contains no more than a check table ranging from "poor" to "excellent" where the different standards are poorly or not at all described. A well written rubric can also help multiple people grade similarly on the criteria and standards although you may need some training to "get on the same page" and apply the criteria and standards in the same way. The professor teaching the class should help you with this. Once you get used to using the rubric grading will go much faster.
- When you use a rubric, and you grade a lab report or paper, you should look for the elements spelled out in the rubric in the report or paper. Focus your attention on finding just those elements and ignore the superfluous stuff. You do not have to read every word the students write. In other words, your reading of their work has to become a focused search of how well their work matches the criteria and standards described in the rubric. Understand the rubric in depth and know what you are looking for in the students' work. This will speed up your grading.
- Using the rubric correctly and consistently will also make your grading fair. You also don't need to see the name of the student to grade their work. If you are afraid your grading will be biased, put sticky notes over the student names before you start grading and shuffle to pile of papers.
- To provide feedback you should provide the students with a copy of the completed rubric. If the standards for the various criteria are clearly and unambiguously described, circling that "box" in the rubric let's the student know what performance level they achieved and what they need to do next to get to the higher level. You can still provide general feedback about the average performance in the class when you return their work. Address the criteria on which the average performance was poor and let the entire class know what they need to do to perform better. Point to the requirements for the next performance level (standard) in the rubric.
- The standards described in the rubric provide the basis for the feedback you can provide the students. If you are consistent in applying the rubric you can quickly identify the students that completely missed the boat, contact them individually, and ask what went wrong. Some of you wrote that you do this already. Applying the rubric consistently really help with this. Believe me, most students will greatly appreciate it when you do this and be better motivated to improve on the next assignment. This is what teaching is about; helping student learn and perform at a higher level.
- If you use a rubric, you can almost eliminate the comments you would normally write on a paper. If you leave some space at the bottom of the rubric sheet, you can write comments there.
- Just like having your own annotation system for reading, you can also develop an annotation systems for commenting on a paper. Develop symbols (share their meaning with your students) that you use to mark up a paper and that can serve to point out problems in their work. This will reduce the amount of writing you have to do.
Have students submit electronic versions only. Reviewing a paper electronically can be faster than doing it by hand because almost all of us type faster than we can write and it will be legible. The "Tracking" tool in MS-word under the "Review" tab is quite powerful and you can comment on items as well - If you use Multiple Choice (MC) quizzes, see if you can set them up on Blackboard. The automatic grading feature will make life so much easier. There are numerous faculty members who have figured out how to use the Blackboard quiz feature effectively for student learning. To learn more about this attend the September 23, 2009 workshop. See http://cetalweb.utep.edu/home/ events page and registration.
If you use scantrons for quizzes find a scantron machine so you don't have to hand score hundreds of them. There is no need for wasting your time that way.
Some of you ask students to write journals and use guidelines. Journaling and reflections can be very helpful in learning, but you do need to specify what you expect them to write about so that your expectations are clear to the students. - Getting students to prepare for an assignment is a challenge but there are ways to do it. Check with your faculty member, but the Blackboard quiz module is a great tool for this.
Some of you worried about the grade distribution. When grading students' work, you have to discriminate between those who did excellent work and those who did not. Not doing so makes education a farce. Besides, the students know who did good work and who did not, so your assessment of their work should discriminate. If you don't, you are not being fair and you are not helping the students in their education. To improve their performance level you have to be honest with them and not let them falsely believe they are doing fine. That false sense of competency you are giving them will come to haunt them in the future.
Item 14 also related to being lenient versus being strict. That is really not the issue. The question is what is your most honest assessment of their performance. If it's poor they need to know it is poor; not "oh, for now it's o.k." That is not the way to help our students do better. Tell them what they did not do well and give them error-correction feedback that allows them to do better the next time. You can also allow them to correct their work based on your feedback and resubmit it (if the faculty member you're working for allows it). - Be persistent in asking for high quality work, and grade that work consistently. If a student did well on the first couple assignments but dropped the ball on a later one, grade that performance truthfully and don't assume that "she knows how to do this" and give a higher grade.
- Publish your rubric and grading criteria to the students in advance so they know what is expected of them. This should not be secret. Knowing this allows them to prepare will for the work and focuses your feedback on the things that count.
- In general, when you provide feedback try to ensure that the students do something with it. Ask them to decide what they will do different next time and have them write those decisions down. You can then ask them to look back at what they wrote and let them assess how well they stayed with their own decisions. Too often we assume that students will do this automatically. They do not.
- Give students links to online resources that can help them do better. There is a lot out there so pick and choose what you believe may be best, and let them know how they can use it, and what they are not allowed to do with it.
- Finally, looking at your learning styles blogs it appears that some of you are thinking that learning styles determine learning. That is not necessarily the case. Learning styles reflect the preferred ways in which people process information. For example, I am a visual learning which means I like to learn from visual images much more than I like to learn from reading text. That does not mean I cannot learn from text, but I pick things up quicker when I see it done. You cannot possibly satisfy all the variations in learning styles you will have in your classroom. What you can do is vary your delivery of information. Use numerous combinations of text, graphics, multimedia, animations, etc. That also keeps the presentations interesting from a student's perspective and increase motivation to learn. More important than the delivery mode of information is that you engage the students in doing something with that information.
HM~
