grading and feedback

college students in large classroom

Continuous and Rapid Testing (CaRT): A Simple Tool for Assessment and Communication

Most conventional assessment strategies provide limited opportunities for instructors to realign teaching methods and revisit topics that students have not understood well. Teachers can communicate with students individually, but time constraints may prevent multiple individual conversations. Some students in the classroom are reluctant to ask

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Teacher working at desk

Making Feedback Matter

As teachers, we spend countless hours staying up late, reading essays, and making comments to help our students improve. We walk a delicate line, wanting to give students enough support to develop their papers while not overwhelming them with red ink. We carefully foster their

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student studying on laptop

Dos and Don’ts of Effective Feedback

Do provide feedback that is action-oriented and tells student what they should do with the feedback information. Don’t focus exclusively on the cognitive component of learning without considering the impact of feedback on students’ motivation in the online classroom.

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student studying

What’s a Good Faith Effort?

In some types of assignments, it’s the process that’s more important than the product. Journals and online discussion exchanges, even homework problems, are good examples. Students are thinking and learning as they work to sort through ideas, apply content, or figure out how to solve

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Exploring the advantages of rubrics

Exploring the Advantages of Rubrics

“I don’t believe in giving students rubrics,” a faculty member told me recently. “They’re another example of something that waters down education.” I was telling him about a study I’d just read that documented some significant improvement in student papers when students used a detailed

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Using Grading Policies to Promote Learning

Using Grading Policies to Promote Learning

I just finished putting together some materials on grading policies for a series of Magna 20-Minute Mentor programs, and I am left with several important take-aways on the powerful role of grading policies. I’m not talking here about the grades themselves, but instead the policies

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When to Use Whole Class Feedback

Whole class feedback … you know, when the teacher returns a set of papers or exams and talks to the entire class about its performance, or the debriefing part of an activity where the teacher comments on how students completed the task. I don’t

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Motivating Students: Should Effort Count?

I’ve always said no, effort shouldn’t count. When students pleaded, “but I worked so hard,” or “I studied so long,” I would respond with the clichéd quip about people with brain tumors not wanting surgeons who try hard. Besides if students try hard,

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Four Key Questions about Grading

There’s an excellent article on grading in a recent issue of Cell Biology Education-Life Sciences Education. It offers a brief history of grading (it hasn’t been around for all that long), and then looks to the literature for answers to four key questions.

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Most conventional assessment strategies provide limited opportunities for instructors to realign teaching methods and revisit topics that students have not understood well. Teachers can communicate with students individually, but time constraints may prevent multiple individual conversations. Some students in the classroom are reluctant to ask questions and admit confusion. We are overcoming these difficulties with a simple method of assessment that improves communication between teachers and students. The method is called Continuous and Rapid Testing (CaRT). Here’s how CaRT works when I (TKD) use it in my undergraduate biochemistry class. At the start of every class, I hand out an index card to each student. Then I show a slide with one to three questions that require short answers. My goal is to use questions that encourage students to think critically about topics taught in the previous class session. The students have five minutes to write down their answers on the index cards. On the back of the cards, students write their names, and I invite them to mention any topic from the previous class session that they found difficult to understand. They can also offer input regarding the topics we discussed in the previous class and the teaching methods I used to present them. After collecting the index cards, I share the correct answers on a slide and then begin the discussion of the day’s topic. The accumulated CaRT questions may serve as a question bank for midterm and final exams. To encourage students to use them for that purpose, I email each student the CaRT questions and answers. Before the next class, I review all the index cards but do not grade the answers. In a biochemistry class with 39 students (mostly undergraduate and a few graduate students), it took less than an hour to go through all the answers and the comments. Since CaRT answers and comments are not anonymous, I immediately become aware of how well each student understood the material we’d just covered. Their weaknesses are not masked as they sometimes are in group learning activities. If many students are finding the topic difficult and don’t yet really understand it, I can review that material again in class. If only a few individuals are struggling with a particular concept, I email these students, inviting them to come and talk with me so I can help them understand the concept. On midterm teaching evaluations, the students reported that they found CaRT to be helpful, and they offered similar positive views on their end-of-semester evaluations. The CaRT activity takes less than 10 minutes of classroom time, and it doesn’t take me a lot of additional time, since I don’t grade the answers. I have found that not grading the answers encourages students to offer responses that are more intellectually adventurous and uninhibited. Students have an incentive to take the CaRT activity seriously; regular completion is a component of the class participation grade. CaRT encourages shy and silent students to speak their minds. Shy students, who may not want to email the instructor, communicate daily with him or her through their answers to CaRT questions and comments on the index cards. Sometimes the possibility of being made fun of by their peers stops students from speaking in the classroom, and CaRT removes all these risks. CaRT does not increase anxiety and competition. Rather, it prevents students in large classes from feeling anonymous. They know their answers and comments are being read. CaRT can help teachers feel the “pulse” and progress of the class on a day-to-day basis and help in monitoring attendance. It encourages students to come to class prepared and reduces procrastination. An activity like CaRT is versatile enough to be used by instructors in many different disciplines. Tarun K. Dam and Purnima Bandyopadhyay, Michigan Technological University.