Talk to Text: A Hack on Grading
A wise and dear colleague of mine, now retired, once said to me as we walked to class, “I teach for free; they pay me
Vicki Ingalls
August 12, 2019
A FREE PUBLICATION FROM THE TEACHING PROFESSOR
grading and feedback
Contested Grades and the “You Earned It” Retort
A common rhetorical move we professors make when students object to a grade is to reframe the discussion. We’ll say, “Let’s be clear. I didn’t give you this grade. You earned it.” And if it were appropriate we might underscore our zinger with a smugly snapped Z. But stop and think about it. When we make the “you earned it” move, it’s simply an attempt to shift the debate away from the fairness or interpretation of our standard and onto students to justify their effort by our standard, which really wasn’t their complaint.
Steve Snyder
December 14, 2018
Using Rubrics as a Defense Against Grade Appeals
Faculty dread the grade appeal; anxiety prevails until the whole process is complete. Much has been written about how to avoid such instances, but the potentially subjective assessments of written essays or clinical skills can be especially troublesome. One common cause of grade appeals is grading ambiguity in which the student and faculty member disagree on the interpretation of required content. Another cause is inequity, whereby the student feels others may have gotten more credit for very similar work or content (Hummel 2010). In the health-care field especially, these disagreements over clinical-skills assessments can actually result in student dismissal from the program and may lead to lawsuits.
Sydney Fulbright PhD
October 18, 2018
Ideas for Rethinking Your Quiz Tactics
If your quiz strategies are becoming stale, this free report is loaded with fresh ideas that will help you better understand why you are using quizzes, what you hope they will accomplish, and how they can best be used to facilitate student learning.
Faculty Focus
March 7, 2018
Helping Students Recognize Quality Work, Fix What Isn’t Good
How good are your students at assessing the quality of their work? Do they understand and act on the feedback you provide? I’ll wager that some students do. But the rest—they don’t know if what they’re turning in is good, not so good, or what they were supposed to do. If you ask how an assignment turned out, most students are fearfully noncommittal. The verbally confident proclaim that it’s excellent and hope you’ll remember that when you grade it. And this inability to ascertain quality and shortcomings applies to papers, essay answers, proposed solutions to open-ended messy problems, creative performances (artistic, musical, for example), and engineering and architectural projects.
Maryellen Weimer, PhD
October 25, 2017
A Challenge to Current Grading Practices
There’s a lot to be gained from considering ideas and arguments at odds with current practice. In higher education, many instructional practices are accepted and replicated with little thought. Fortunately, there are a few scholars who keep asking tough questions and challenging conventional thinking. Australian D. Royce Sadler is one of them. His views on feedback and assessment are at odds with the mainstream, but his scholarship is impeccable, well-researched, and logically coherent. His ideas merit our attention, make for rich discussion, and should motivate us to delve into the assumptions that ground current policies and practices.
Maryellen Weimer, PhD
August 30, 2017
Using Screencasts for Formative and Summative Assessment
As a new teacher, one of the resources I found most helpful in shaping my grading practices was Grant Wiggins’s advice on feedback and assessment. Meaningful feedback, he suggests, is much more than assigning a grade or even offering recommendations for improvement. Rather, meaningful feedback is descriptive, “play[ing] back” the student’s performance and connecting it to the learning outcomes of the course.
Megan Von Bergen
July 21, 2017
How Students Perceive Feedback
The following conceptions of feedback were offered by a group of students studying to become physical therapists. They were asked to recall a situation during their time in higher education when they felt they’d experienced feedback. Then they were asked a series of questions about the experience and about feedback more generally: “What is feedback? How would you describe it? How do you go about getting it? How do you use it?” (p. 924) The goal of the study was to investigate students’ conceptions of feedback. Student conceptions involve underlying personal beliefs, views, and ideas, unlike student perceptions, which explore how the feedback is understood. Analysis of transcripts from the interviews reveal four conceptions of feedback held by this student group
Maryellen Weimer, PhD
June 30, 2017
Does the Strategy Work? A Look at Exam Wrappers
For many faculty, adding a new teaching strategy to our repertoire goes something like this. We hear about an approach or technique that sounds like a good idea. It addresses a specific instructional challenge or issue we’re having. It’s a unique fix, something new, a bit different, and best of all, it sounds workable. We can imagine ourselves doing it.
Maryellen Weimer, PhD
June 14, 2017
Do Quizzes Improve Student Learning? A Look at the Evidence
There’s a lot of talk these days about evidence-based instructional practices, so much that I’ve gotten worried we aren’t thinking enough about what that means.
Maryellen Weimer, PhD
February 1, 2017
