At our recent DOTS Alumni event, a faculty member from the College of Education was going to present on his methodology for efficient and effective grading. He then had a conflict with the event, so I presented in his place – and, as per usual, a colleague’s good idea sparked an interesting research path.
Dr. Philip Gnilka introduced me to the idea of using an Excel spreadsheet with coded comments to give feedback to students. He was inspired by the process detailed in Andrew J. Czaplewski’s article, “Computer-Assisted Grading Rubrics: Automating the Process of Providing Comments and Student Feedback”.
The article details how to grade with an Excel spreadsheet, a self-contained document with an assignment rubric on one page and the codes for pre-drafted comments on a second page. For Philip, this works well. In the spreadsheet, he can fill out the rubric on the first page, type in the codes that refer to the comments he wants to give, and pull those comments into the page with the rubric. He then uses the Save As function to save a copy for the student and either upload (to D2L) or email the graded document for the student.
I can see how this would work well for a presentation assignment, but I spend most of my time grading student writing, and I wasn’t sure if students would like getting two documents – a Word document with comments and an Excel document with their grades – back from me. But, I liked the idea of finding a way to set up coded comments that I could call into whatever document I’m grading.
That’s how my digging brought me to text expansion tools. Text expanders allow you to create shorthand codes for longer chunks of text. For example, you could create a code for “name and address.” When you type in that code, perhaps something like “n&a,” your full name and address appears.
One key quality of text expander tools is that they run in the background, ready for you to call up your codes anywhere you’re typing – a Word document, an email, a GoogleDoc, anywhere. For this experiment, I’m using the $5 Mac option aText, and I read positive reviews for PhraseExpress for Windows.
So, I’ve started building a bank for common grammar errors for use as I give students feedback for the rest of the quarter:
My methodology has been to build two comments for each grammar error: the first comment has a longer code (e.g., “,sentfrag”) that has a correspondingly long explanation of the error with examples; the second has a shorter code (e.g., “,sf”), which just points out the error. When I’m grading a paper, I’ll use the longer comment the first time I see an error; in subsequent instances of the same error, I’ll use the second code.
In theory, this should work. I’ll probably need to print a little cheat sheet of my codes at first, and I also intend to keep building in codes as I’m giving feedback, but I’m interested to see if this allows me to keep giving thorough feedback while saving a bit of time.
If so, next step: create a set of feedback codes for each assignment, similar to what’s detailed in the article above, for common content or genre feedback that I give for each assignment.
Thank you for sharing this! When I used TurnItIn, an “anti-plagarism” tool while grading papers while earning my PhD, it had a similar feature that allowed you to choose a button and insert text comments in student documents. They were totally editable and you could easily create new ones. I no longer have access and have been missing this ability, so thank you for the work-around!
I know exactly what you’re talking about, Cindy. We also have TurnItIn integrated with our learning management system, and once you’re in TurnItIn, you can access Grademark, the tool that allows you to create that wonderful comment bank. We’ve run into trouble because it’s difficult to instruct students on how to get over to TurnItIn/Grademark, so I’m hoping aText will replicate that feature for me, too!
These external tools solve one of my frustrations of using the D2L rubrics for grading. D2L rubrics require you to build and publish them prior to use. Once published, you cannot change the rubric.
From the point of view that one should have a consistent rubric for all students, and a student exploring the rubric after the fact should see the same information used for grading–this makes sense. [At least that’s the only reason I can think of they would build it this way].
From the point of view that an instructor is constantly evolving and expanding the content of comments in the rubric as the instructor sees repeated patterns while grading, this D2L tool does not work at all.
But the spreadsheet does permit evolving content in the rubric, so is much superior for my needs.