Posts Tagged ‘providing assessment feedback’
March 26 - Why Doesn’t Teacher Feedback Improve Student Performance?
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching and Learning
Sometimes feedback leads to better performance, but not all the time and not as often as teachers would like, given the time and effort they devote to providing students feedback. It’s easy to blame students who seem interested only in the grade—do they even read the feedback? Most report that they do, but even those who pay attention to it don’t seem able to act on it—they make the same errors in subsequent assignments. Why is that?
January 18 - The Assessment Movement: Revisiting Faculty Resistance
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Educational Assessment
“We ought to be up to the task of figuring out what it is that our students know by the end of four years at college that they did not know at the beginning.” That’s how Stanley Katz begins a well-written essay that explores the assessment movement in higher education.
August 17 - Establishing a Fair and Supportive Grading Environment
By: Mary Bart in Educational Assessment
Grading serves multiple purposes. While the most obvious purpose is to evaluate students’ work — as a measure of competency, achievement, and meeting the expectations of the course — grading can also be a key to communication, motivation, organization and faculty/student reflection. It’s for that reason that Virginia Johnson Anderson, EdD, calls grading “a context-dependent, complex process.”
May 16 - Grading Strategies to Promote Student & Faculty Success
By: Mary Bart in Online Seminars
When you give your grading as much care and attention as you give the rest of your course design components, you will start to see improvements in student performance and experience greater personal satisfaction in teaching. Learn how to make positive changes to your grading strategies and tactics.
May 3 - The Online Educator’s Complete Guide to Grading Assignments, Part 2
By: Errol Craig Sull in Online Education
On Tuesday, I provided general suggestions on course-based grading expectations practices. Here I share some ideas for grading specific assignments.
Use a bank of comments that are precise, detailed, and clear. The smart online educator is the one who has a bank of comments from which he/she can draw on to give students feedback on any number of items in the course. But there are two important items here that will make these precast comments most effective: 1) Have comments point out not only when something is wrong but also why it is wrong and how to get it right. In this manner, each comment becomes a mini teacher’s aide in the assignment. 2) Adjust (personalize) any comment as is necessary when your comment as written does not exactly match the problem you see in the student’s assignment. This way each comment is a perfect fit for the error, allowing the student to learn more fully.
April 30 - Critical Friends: A Novel Approach to Improving Peer and Instructor Feedback
By: Debbi Leialoha, Ph.D., Shelly Leialoha, Ph.D., & Sherry-Leialoha-Waipa, Ph.D. in Educational Assessment
We appreciated reading Dr. Weimer’s article “Getting students to act on our feedback” (March 5, 2012). The solution proposed of asking students to identify three ways to improve their assignment based on instructor feedback is a great idea. We would like to offer a further solution that addresses students’ incorporating instructor feedback.
March 20 - Making Exams More about Learning
By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Educational Assessment
We give exams to assess mastery of material—are students learning the course content? With so much emphasis on scores and grades, it’s easy to forget that the process of preparing for, taking, and getting feedback about an exam can also be a learning experience. The learning that results from these processes can be tacit, or teachers can design activities associated with exam events that can result in better content learning and heightened student awareness of the learning skills associated with demonstrating knowledge. The good news is that these activities don’t have to be all that creative and innovative, as Thomas Smith discovered.
July 27 - The Four Questions Every Assessment Report Should Answer
By: Mary Bart in Educational Assessment
Of all the activities that go into educational assessment, ironically two of most rewarding also are two of the most overlooked: 1). sharing the results with stakeholders and 2). using the results to effect change.
After devoting so much time and energy to creating assessments, far too often what happens is someone takes the data that’s been gathered and compiles a dense, statistics-laden report that is difficult to find, read, or understand. Meanwhile everyone else turns their attention to more pressing matters; happy they finally got rid of that annoying pebble in their shoe.
June 17 - Should We Teach Students to Say ‘I Don’t Know’?
By: Bob Eierman in Teaching and Learning
When I began teaching, I encountered many students who didn’t know things. I had to grade papers that were filled with long, complicated narrations, written by students who clearly didn’t have a clue what they were writing about. Students continue to take this strategy, fervently hoping that the grader won’t recognize their ignorance, or will award at least a few partial credit points. How I longed for a simple “I don’t know” as an answer.
June 1 - Moving Ahead with Learning Assessment
By: Mary Bart in Online Seminars
Your assessments are a powerful tool, not a burdensome requirement. They generate valuable information about what works and what doesn’t at your school. Using that information to make decisions—about everything from curriculum and campus services to vision statements and goal setting to budgeting and development—substantiates your assessment program’s value.
