Classroom Feedback and Grading Discussion at S-I

Assessment:

• early responses and intervention more effective than comments at the end of course; formative feedback (e.g.: proposals); may or may not include a grade. (it's either there or it's not there is one approach). includes a lot of written feedback.
• "subjective" judgment and grading; specify criteria and standards in syllabus or assingment sheet; apply the standards to drafts for intermediate feedback and then to the final product. Questions about fairness when some put more effort into projects than others--often, specifying the standards and criteria can eliminate the perception of "subjective" grading.
  

Good Techniques:

• having the first draft read out loud by the student to the instructor at conferences or to other students (they can hear logic, style, mechanic, flow issues), peer-to-peer reviews can also work for larger groups.
• stage the feedback: content and idea-based feedback so that there is enough involved in their next draft to make mechanical/flow suggestions later. "Student sentences must grow rank before they can be pruned,"--Postman?
  
• give peers a criteria sheet that is collected by the instructor
• ask outside faculty/professionals to help evaluate projects.
• create surveys at the end of the semester. surveymonkey.com free service
• ITS created a survey tool you can access through your PAWS account to create a survey.
• outlines to review big picture, followed by a visual diagram of the essay that shows the layout of the essay.
• periodic evaluation as opposed to a final evaluation leads to better projects
• samples of well-executed projects distributed to the students helps them to model their own work.
• provide criteria for poor execution as well as for excellent execution. mark up student projects and cross-reference them back to the describe criterion.

Issues:

• have to give up some content to focus on the feedback, but it might be worth it. active learning allows students to actually retain more. Many believe that the students actually end up learning more content this way.

Requests:

• how do we construct peer-group-review assignments outside of class.

Thanks to Colleen Fava for taking notes during this discussion at the 2008 Summer Institute.