Week 15

of History of Absolutely Fascinating Thing to Academics, and an unamused doggo.

Apr 20, 2023

Academe (where a weathered historian shares)

With the imminent end of the semester, grading continues to dominate my landscape, and will continue into next week. To keep myself operating as a grading machine, I think about how to be creative with feedback and the main question I keep asking myself, to keep creativity alive, is, “what does this student need to hear in order to improve?”

Process

After I pour the requisite cup of tea and clear the desk, I re-read the assignment guidelines and the rubric before I begin grading. These represent the “brief” that was given out and re-reading them calibrates my expectations. Does the assignment ask for a specific question to be answered? Or is the assignment open-ended? What does the rubric emphasize?

My goal is to grade one at a time with copious attention, in order to understand what the student wanted to say. From there it becomes a creative enterprise to figure out how to clarify to the student what was done well and what needs improvement. Why do I say “creative?” While a rubric summarizes expectations in a generic way and its immutability is necessary for its purpose, each student may not understand how those expectations translate into the real world, that is, into the actual work for an assignment.

I have written about rubrics before (click here to read that rumination); let me plunge into an example. A student may have written a paper and I may have highlighted the rubric thus:

A grading rubric with highlighting of what the paper demonstrated in yellow and what needs work in blue. — Grading Rubric for a Paper: Highlighted in yellow are criteria items that the paper demonstrated and highlighted in blue are items that need work.

But will the student know what I mean by highlighting “summary rather than analysis“ as something that the paper demonstrated?

This is where some creativity comes into play. At the end of the paper, I give general comments.

GENERAL COMMENTS:
…the evidence was mostly quotations from the textbook with minimal or no discussion relating it to the paper’s over-arching argument. Your own line of reasoning and argumentation ought to be at the forefront of a paper. …

That’s still a bit general, obviously, so in the margins of the body of the paper I insert a comment or two to illustrate point. Next to a quotation I inserted the following comment,

This is not an effective use of a quotation because no analysis of it accompanies the quotation; it seems just “tacked on” to the end of this paragraph. What does what he said have to do with the paper’s thesis? Does it help you see what the paper’s thesis should be? How so? Does this quotation clarify something about the paper’s thesis? Does it make the thesis more complicated?

This is a mere taste of grading a paper. As I think about how to write about grading, I come to a deeper recognition of how subtly different elements of a paper influence grading and I fear that sharing just one element will not provide a clear enough tableau of how comments on many elements come together to guide a student toward better writing and better historical interpretation. For example, if a paper does not have a clear and precise thesis, as the one for this example did not, then comments about evidence become about improving the thesis. As I grade, unconsciously I am combining my evaluation of these different elements to decide how to frame the feedback. As I write this post, I improve my understanding and consciousness of how I write feedback and, once again, writing is thinking.