Time Savers: correction work and feedback
Correction work and feedback - the BIG ONE
For many of us, correction work and feedback represent the bulk of our teaching-related activities during peak weeks. But other weeks too require us to monitor student progress, and communicate our findings back to students to help them develop and grow. How can we give meaningful feedback when pressed for time? How can we make correction and grading easier for ourselves? Below are some suggestions for you to consider.
Feedback: the student perspective
Peer-to-peer feedback
With the help of a rubric, get students to give feedback on each other’s work, before the work is officially submitted. This gives students the opportunity to improve their work with each other’s help. Have feedback-giving students provide written comments in the rubric, with references to pages or quotes from their colleague’s work, where appropriate.
The filled-in rubric is submitted together with the final version of the assignment and functions as a starting point for the teacher’s assessment of the work. Most teachers will recognise a poorly filled-in rubric, and give greater scrutiny to the submitted assignment. In the majority of cases, however, the ground-work will have been done, and the rubric functions as a road map to the assignment. Any new quick comments the teacher adds to the rubric can refer to more elaborate comments already there.
Feedback during class
Although the work of individual students may differ, there are certain mistakes that commonly occur in certain assignments. Spending some time on these mistakes in your lessons is beneficial for the whole group. In addition, this then allows you to skip elaborate individual feedback on these mistakes, and the need to repeat this for every assignment.
In student evaluations, students often ask to be given more feedback. It can therefore be helpful to occasionally remind students that feedback does not just consist of comments given on a specific assignment. Feedback delivered orally to the group as a whole is also feedback. In addition, feedback is not the same as giving the right answer, and may well come in the form of a question for the student to then delve into themselves.
Tools
Digitalising feedback?
Digital tools can speed up your grading, especially if you use it more often for the same assignment. Assessment tools, such as Turnitin, allow you to add to and choose from a list of comments you can use as feedback. However, manually adding these comments for reuse can initially dramatically slow down your grading. After you have gone through the first five to ten students, however, your grading time increases rapidly. The more students you have to grade, or the more often you teach a course, the more you will benefit from tools such as this.
Using rubrics
Another tool, which can be integrated into some assessment programmes or can be made as a separate Office document, is a scoring rubric. Rubrics vary from topic to topic, but usually contain at least the components that you want to give points for and/or give feedback on, the scale on which you award these points, and a brief description of the criteria for these points on the scale to be rewarded. The latter also functions as feedback information for the student. You can leave room for further comments, if you wish, of course.
Rubrics can be rigid and they take some planning ahead. This can be made easier, as well as more effective, by using the learning targets of the course as a starting point and adjusting these to suit the specific assignment. Thus, the wording of the criteria in the rubric will not be wholly unfamiliar to the students.
Not all assignments or even courses benefit from rubrics. They are especially useful for assignments that consist of clearly recognisable components. For courses that are taught by multiple teachers, rubrics can save a lot of people a lot of time, and ensure that all student work is assessed in more or less the same way. You can find more about rubrics on our assessment pages.
Model answers
Model answers are often used for assessing open questions in exams or other more language-heavy types of testing knowledge and understanding. As with other tools, some initial time investment can save time in the long run. Adding points in brackets immediately after terms or ideas that should be in the answer will speed up grading, for instance. So will examples of incomplete or imperfect answers and the score they would receive.
Note that model answers are often shown to students afterwards as examples of what they should have done or said. Teachers who are familiar with this, know that this can lead to a lot of discussion. It can therefore be helpful to assess and rephrase the model answers after they have been used for assessment. This allows them to be made clearer for students and incorporate actual examples from the assessment.
Tricks and choices
Divide the workload if you can
When grading large exams, it can speed things up enormously if – rather than each person checking the entire exam – the questions are divided among the teachers and lecturers involved. One or two people can become the owner of a specific exam question. This has the added benefit of minimising differences and how each student is assessed for each question.
Though the example of exam correction is above is already common practice among many teaching teams, this is less so for tutorial-group assignments. However, here too teachers can decide to share and divide the workload for larger assignments with separate components.
Even the lone individual teacher may find that for some assignments, it helps to assess per question rather than per student. Again, this works best for assignments with distinct, self-contained components, however.
“Synecdoche” assessment
This is my personal term for treating a detail of the assignment as representative of the whole. Although we cannot always be both as detailed and as comprehensive as we would wish in our assessment of every assignment, we can offer our students a variety of types of feedback across their assignments.
Where some of the suggestions on this page rely on generalising feedback into broader terms that are applicable to multiple comparable student mistakes, this does the opposite. Here, feedback is highly detailed and highly individual. Depending on the size of the assignment, one to three pages are looked at and commented on line by line. But that’s it. The rest of the assignment is simply assumed to similar.
Unlike rubrics, for instance, this tends to work better for written assignments and argumentative essays, or assignments in which multiple skills are employed throughout. For students, this is an uncommon form of assessment, and it may merit announcing it in advance.
Consider alternatives
Do I need to assess this?
Although it is important to have some tangible and objectifiable notion of students abilities, efforts and progress, sometimes all this testing and assessment can get into the way of exactly these efforts abilities and progress. Written assignments take up time from students as well as teachers. This time could be spent on furthering the student’s knowledge and progress, instead of proving previously obtained knowledge has been properly absorbed.
Ideally all learning objectives find their way into assessment of one kind or another. However, not all learning objectives need to be assessed multiple times. Critically evaluating whether a written assignment or other form of testing is justified, can give a breather to both student and teacher, as well as allow for less tangible forms of growth and development.
Video assignments
The spoken word tens to be quicker to asses than the written word, yet comes with its own challenges. In addition, in this day and age, we are required to communicate in different ways, to different audiences using different media. More on video assignments and how to assessment, can be found here.