About Teaching: Student Evaluation and Assessment

Assessment – whether a course assignment, exam, or other kind of feedback – helps both you and the students understand what they have and have not learned.  It should be related to your course goals and student learning objectives.  Thus, it may be about recalling facts, connecting facts, synthesizing information, applying knowledge, evaluating information, etc.  Assessment can be formative (in-process feedback), summative (for a grade), or both.

As much as possible, assessment should be varied and occur at multiple points throughout the semester.  Remember that it does not have to be exclusively your job.  Having students evaluate their work and the work of their peers is a valuable learning experience because it makes evaluation criteria explicit, it helps students learn to apply the criteria, and ultimately, it gives them ownership of what they learn.  Equally importantly, assessment will enhance your teaching and learning practices.

Assignments and Exams

• Designing Effective Assignments
• Designing Effective Exams

Student Evaluation

• About Grading
• Providing Effective Feedback
• Grading with Rubrics
• Attendance as a Factor in Grading
• Assessing Participation
• End of Semester Grading

Course Feedback

• Seeking Useful Feedback
• Mid-Semester Feedback
  • A Quantitative Approach
  • A Qualitative Approach
• Course Evaluation

Additional References

Tips for Designing Effective Assignments

Relate your assignments to your course learning goals and objectives.  For each assignment, know what you expect beforehand in terms of content, structure, level of work, length.  Base your evaluation criteria on these expected outcomes.

Clearly communicate these expectations to your students through detailed assignment guidelines, evaluation criteria, and grading rubrics.

Ask a colleague to review your assignment for clarity.

Create opportunities for student feedback before the final submission for major assignments.  This requires that students start early, allows you to clarify expectations, and can result in better outcomes.  Possible strategies include:

Ask students to turn in a self-assessment using the evaluation criteria and/or grading rubric.

Keep a record of what you liked about the assignment and what you would do differently the next time to improve students' learning outcomes.  You can also ask students for feedback on the assignment as part of your final course evaluation.

Final Thought:
Remember that designing effective assignments is an iterative process that requires reflection and a willingness to experiment with new ideas.

Tips for Designing Effective Exams

The types of exams you give, in terms of material included, ways of asking questions, and levels of thinking required, set the tone for the course.  If you want students to analyze, synthesize, and critically assess, your exams must reflect this.  If you ask questions which only require reiteration of facts, then that is the level at which the student will approach the course.  Equally importantly, your approach to teaching (e.g., what you concentrate on in lecture, discussion, labs, and other classroom activities) should mirror what you expect students to know for the exams.

Relate your exams to your course learning goals and objectives.  List the important concepts, principles, and skills you want students to master. Then list the various ways in which you have taught the material and fluencies you want the student achieve.

Use a variety of types of questions (e.g., multiple choice, short answer, matching, essay) that match up with the concepts, principles and skills you listed.  Provide students various ways of demonstrating their knowledge and skills.

Assess for major ideas and key concepts, not details (e.g., rather than ask for exact date of an event important, ask about the event's impact, or what precipitated it).

Manage your time so that you are not writing an exam in one sitting.  Try writing down one or two items that relate to each class session just afterwards.  When you are ready to draft your exam, examine these items, in concert with your goals for the course.

Use homework or in-class activities to give students practice at responding to items like those you will use on the exam.

Ask your TAs or a colleague to review an exam for clarity before you finalize it.

You may want to let students bring a "memory jogger" card to class, with important facts, figures, and/or equations, etc.  It means you can ask more sophisticated questions and the act of deciding what to put on the card is a great study experience for the students.

Final Thought:
Think about ways to get the students to learn what they didn't know on the exam. You might redesign or create new assignments, encourage students to come to your office hours, schedule a review session, or let students rewrite part of an exam for partial credit.

Grading with Rubrics

Rubrics make grading easier when you outline before grading exactly what you want to see from the student.  When you grade a complex assignment with a rubric, you provide both a grade and feedback to the student. Rubrics work particularly well on for grading essays, problems with multiple steps, oral presentations, final papers, and other complex assignments. You may even want to give your students the grading rubric with the assignment, so they can see exactly how they will be graded.

Developing a rubric:

• Clearly define the assignment, and describe key components
• Establish standards for each component

Decide if you are using a holistic or analytic rubric

• Holistic, with a grade given for an entire assignment.  These work well for shorter assignments where the student needs an overall impression of how well they did.
• Analytic, with feedback broken down over aspects of the assignment.  These work well on more complex assignments, or where students need feedback over the areas they need to improve, and where they have strengths.

Assign point values or ranges for each level of competency

• Holistic example: Needs work (0-3), Satisfactory (4-6), Good (7-9), Exemplary (10)
• Analytic component example: Grammar: Not intelligible (0), Major grammar mistakes that make the work difficult to read (1), Inconsistent grammar, but paper meaning is clear (2), Minor grammar mistakes and typos (3), No mistakes in grammar (4)

• Review and download a sample rubric for grading a research paper.
• Dr. Nada Dabbagh has an excellent rubric for assessing on-line discussions.
• The Critical Thinking rubric ( .doc file) is a nice model and can be adapted for many assignments.

This teaching tip was summarized from Instructional Assessment Resources at the University of Texas.

Assessing participation

In some classes, it is important to encourage and assess student participation.  Some professors would like to do this, but worry about fairly quantifying it when calculating grades.

Class participation is can be valued when students:

• prepare for and actively engage in class discussion (active listening, not distracted by electronics or peers)
• thoughtfully engage in in-class assignments  
• constructively participate in group activities
• participate in class discussion by raising informed discussion points; connecting discussion to reading material, news, and relevant experiences; asking questions; listening to other perspectives; and sharing the floor with others
• Be sure to share your expectations for participation with your students and to reinforce and model the behaviors yourself.

Some ways to grade participation:

Be sure to share your expectations for participation with your students and to reinforce and model the behaviors yourself. Some faculty members grade participation by assessing each student daily, while others focus on a randomly selected smaller number of students each day or grade participation only on days when participation is required. Regardless of which approach you choose, having a method for assessing participation is important. The method can be quite simple, for example:

Alternatively, some instructors choose to grade participation across the semester using a rubric. For examples, please see Grading Class Discussion and UVa's Class Discussion.

Hints to help students learn to participate:

• On the first day of class, facilitate having the students make a list of what they expect in an active and engaged class. Once you have the list, post it on Blackboard as the expectations for participation.
• Ask students to bring a list of questions they had about a reading assignment to class to use as prompts.
• Start students with a discussion question in small groups, then report and discuss their answers using spokesperson (Svinicki and McKeachie, 2011, call these Buzz Groups).
• Move students into a small group (especially effective if in a large room where students will spread out if given the choice). One way to do this is ask them not to sit in back rows.
• Have students partner to answer a question, solve a problem, or analyze an argument, then share with the larger group.
• Have students brainstorm a list of answers to a prompt on paper, then add to a growing list on the board.
• Ask students to solve an issue, and give them a short period of time to present a solutions.

See McKeachie's Teaching Tips, Chapter 5: Facilitating Discussion: Posing Problems, Listening, Questioning (Svinicki and McKeachie, 2011) for additional ideas.

End of Semester Grading

Towards the end of the semester, grading can become an onerous task. To stay afloat, keep these tips in mind:

• Make assignments worth grading. If the assignment doesn’t clearly link to your student learning goals, then change it or remove it.

• Understand the goal of grading the assignment. If the assignment will be returned to the student and used to improve their work on the next project, then make necessary comments. If you are grading a text or assignment at the end of the semester, your time will be better spent making few notes.

• Separate commenting from grading. If many students are making the same mistake, note it for yourself and lead the class through it, rather than making individual comments on each page. Note it for following semesters.

• Use a rubric to grade assignments. The time spent making the rubric will be time saved in grading.

• On multiple choice tests, do a quick item analysis. You can quickly see where students showed strengths and weakness. If more than half the students miss a question, check to see if the key was incorrect or answer unclear.

• Get students to help you organize your grading by giving them a checklist of important elements to be included with an assignment and a clear deadline.

• Create a procedure for student questions about grading. Rather than allowing them to come individually or crowd you after class, tell them that you will (for instance) consider any questions that come by email in the next week, with clear questions or explanations of why a grade should be changed.

In the CTE library, we have materials to help you formulate a plan for grading. McKeachie’s Teaching Tips (Svinicki and McKeachie, 2011) and Effective Grading (Walvoord and Anderson, 1988) are good references.

Seeking Useful Feedback

Treat all feedback seriously.

Show that you act on student feedback.

Solicit feedback regularly.  You can easily do this by asking students to respond to a set of questions, to write a question they have, or to comment on what they like and don't like about the class.

Gather mid-semester feedback and consider possible course corrections.

Ask for input on each major assignment - give them a point or two for answering a few questions about the assignment as part of the work they submit.

Model useful feedback in what you provide for the students.

Mid-semester feedback, like all student feedback, can be a valuable tool to find out how students are learning in your class and what you might do to increase their likelihood of success. An excellent tool for fine-tuning your teaching to a particular class, it can help you to understand what's working well and what you might do differently to better meet your teaching goals and students' needs.

Seeking this feedback does not have to take a lot of time or resources, you can decide how structured or extensive you would like this feedback to be. These decisions often depend on your class size and your own evaluation of how well your class(es) are going. For example, if you have a large class or if your expectations for student learning are being met, you might choose a less structured assessment. On the other hand, more structured feedback can be useful to identify specifics aspects of the learning experience that you want to monitor more closely.

Students are typically happy to provide this information; often they see it as an indicator of your interest in their learning. You can choose whether it is anonymous or not. While not necessary, you might consider offering participation points as an incentive for more structured assessments. Do remember if you seek mid-semester feedback students will expect you to respond to it in a meaningful way.  

Less structured feedback typically involves students answering a version of the following three questions in writing:

• What aspect(s) of this course most helps you to learn?
• What aspect(s) of this course are most challenging for you?
• Do you have any suggestions to help you better learn?

Quantitative approaches to this kind of feedback can require less tailoring to a specific course.  The following example provides a few of the categories you might want to address in your assessment, but you can always add more and/or revise the categories below.  Introductory large courses are ideal for this type of approach.  And, you can always choose to ask for both quantitative and qualitative feedback.

MIDTERM FEEDBACK

For each of the following questions, please circle the response that best describes your learning experience in this class.

Mid-Semester Feedback: A Qualitative Approach

Qualitative approaches to this kind of feedback must be tailored to a specific course.  In the following example, the mid-semester feedback is embedded in a student self-assessment of their learning.  In a case like this, you will want to offer points for this assignment.  Synthesis courses might be especially appropriate for this type of assessment.

Midterm Self-Assessment: "Uncovering my Learning Essay"

The midterm self-assessment is a reflection on and assessment of your development and learning at the halfway point.  This is useful to identify your strengths and what is going well for you, in addition to examining what is not working and what you can do differently.  In this writing you should work to draw connections and highlight your growth in a coherent analysis. 

As we have discussed in our course, it is critical to identify and acknowledge the sources that are contributing to your learning.  For this essay you should refer to a minimum of three course texts that have facilitated your growth and development.  Make sure to provide evidence for your analysis by using concrete examples, details, and evidence to support and illustrate key points.  You will need to include a bibliography as well, either a Works Cited page (if using MLA format) or a References page (if using APA format).

You may want to consider the following questions while brainstorming your essay:

• What ideas, theories, and learning experiences are most compelling to you thus far?


• What connections do you find among and between these ideas, theories, and learning experiences within the learning community?


• What connections have you identified between what you are learning in this class and other courses?  Between this class and your major?  Between this class and your learning experiences outside the classroom? 


• How well are you meeting the goals that you set for yourself as a student in this course?  What is going well for you?  Are there goals you want to revise and/or add?


• What is most challenging for you about this course? 


• What could you do differently to meet your goals for yourself and what suggestions do you have for this course?

Your essay should be a minimum of 4 full pages, but do not feel restricted by this length requirement.  A full draft of this essay is due in class February 26th.  Be prepared for our first peer read-around of your essays in that class session.  The final version of this essay is due in class March 5th.  You are asked to turn in your draft, your comments from our peer review session, and your revision.  The final version is worth 100 points, or 10% of your final grade.


Evaluation Criteria:

_____Effective introduction; draws the reader in, creates interest, states main argument(s). 

_____Demonstrates complexity - learning and ideas are articulated clearly and with detail.

_____Incorporates specific examples from the texts and life experiences to illustrate/support key points and build arguments.

_____Demonstrates evidence of integrative thinking; author is making connections across texts and other learning experiences.

_____Provides evidence of significant engagement in course ideas.

_____Paper is well structured and organized; smooth transitions and flow; concludes strongly.

_____Shows attention to writing style (e.g., clarity in writing; evidence of having edited and proofread the work, examples/evidence appropriately integrated and cited; bibliography follows APA/MLA format).

_____Meets assignment guidelines (e.g., incorporates 3 course texts, bibliography is included, essay is at least 4 pp in length).

Additional References

Assessing student learning. (2007). Peer Review: Emerging trends and key debates in undergraduate education, 9(2)

Stevens, D. D., & Levi, A. J. (2004). Introduction to rubrics: An assessment tool to save grading time, convey effective feedback and promote student learning. Sterling: Stylus Publishing.

Walvoord, B. E. F., & Anderson, V. J. (1998). Effective grading: A tool for learning and assessment. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.