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Introduction:
As educators we seek to enhance student engagement and learning outcomes, exploring innovative grading strategies can offer fresh perspectives and effective solutions. Here’s a concise overview of five innovative grading practices:

1. Transparent Grading:


What is it? Transparent grading involves clearly defining and communicating grading criteria, processes, and feedback to students.


Key Elements: Detailed rubrics, open communication, student involvement.


Benefits: Enhanced understanding, improved performance, increased trust.


2. Self-Grading:


What is it? Self-grading allows students to assess their own work, promoting reflection and autonomy.


Key Elements: Self-assessment, reflection, feedback loops.


Benefits: Empowers students, promotes deeper learning, supports self-regulation.


3. Peer Grading (Peer Review):


What is it? Peer grading involves students assessing each other’s work, enhancing collaboration and responsibility.


Key Elements: Peer evaluation, feedback exchange, critical thinking.


Benefits: Deepens understanding, builds skills, fosters collaboration.


4. Gameful or Gamified Grading:


What is it? Gameful grading integrates game design elements, such as points, badges, and leaderboards, into the grading process.


Key Elements: Gamification, student choice, immediate feedback.


Benefits: Increases engagement, enhances mastery, supports skill development.


5. Ungrading:


What is it?: Ungrading minimizes or eliminates traditional grades in favor of detailed feedback and alternative assessments.


Key Elements: Detailed feedback, self-assessment, focus on growth.


Benefits: Promotes deep learning, reduces stress, supports equity.


Explore these strategies to boost student engagement and learning outcomes!

While her academic home is chemistry and her funding was through engineering, Olivia had a broad scope. Her focus was on women graduate students in STEM fields. Her end project resulted in a collaboration with the Academic Women’s Forum and the establishment of graduate student-only dialogues after AWF events.

In our last blog series, we focused on different feedback methods to help you save time by planning and distributing the labor of grading.  Since we have finished that blog series and held a IT lounge about feedback and assessment methods, we realized we had not addressed how to respond to a large amount of student work (large here meaning the size of a lecture course like biology, which is typically 50+). In this blog post, we will address the problems of assessing a large amount of student writing (which you may already know too well!) and offer tools and solutions for dealing with this workload.
Assessing Large Amounts of Student Work
According to the U.S. News and World Report on Education, Michigan State has approximately 38,786 undergraduates enrolled. When you have the opportunity to be a teaching assistant for the large lecture courses (approximately 23% of classes here have more than 50 students), it can feel like you are grading all of them!
Because you are also a graduate student, you have your own work to do: exams to pass, dissertation to write, and job materials to gather. But that’s beside the point–you want to be a helpful teacher while balancing all of your many responsibilities . So what do you do? How do you manage large amounts of student work?
Tools & Solutions
Distribute the labor with a calibrated peer review system like Eli Review or CPR (http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu/Home.aspx). Earlier we talked about setting your students up to give feedback to each other, but this gets tricky in larger classroom because there are so many logistical steps that may leave you facing more challenge. However, there is a solution! Calibrated peer review systems work to take care of the logistical setup of peer review (How will students share their work? With whom will they share it? What kind of comments will they provide each other? When will all this happen?). Systems like Eli Review (a homegrown product from MSU) facilitate much of the process of letting your students give feedback to each other, as well as tell each other how helpful feedback was.
 
If you are a Michigan State affiliate, Eli is free when you use it for Michigan State courses. Currently, Eli is integrated with D2L, so you can activate your account through your course’s D2L site. This video shows you how. Then follow the getting started guide.
 
If you are outside MSU, systems like CPR (http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu/Home.aspx) are available. If you use a course management system (CMS) like Canvas, they also have built in systems to facilitate this kind of review process.
 
When using Eli Review and systems like Eli, we have had success by following these five pedagogical principles and practices:
1) Design a writing assessment document, or rubric, with clear learning goals that you can scaffold.
Before students ever sit down to review one another, make sure you have made clear the writing practices a given assignment is designed to foster. We have found we are most successful as writing teachers when we make the learning goals or criteria for writing assignments as transparent and explicit as possible. This allows you and students to save time by staying on track and using a common measuring standard.
2) Introduce the concept of review early and model how students can review their colleagues’ work.
Review doesn’t need to wait on a completed draft. Instead, Eli is designed to help instructors review early, and review frequently. When we have taught writing, we have found that developing a culture of review early on in a course has helped our students’ overall learning because it front loads assignments and tasks with the learning goals in mind. However, we have also found that students frequently ask us what it is we are “looking for.” And indeed, it’s helpful to show students how to engage in a review process that leads towards your (or your program’s) course goals. Show students what kinds of feedback can be helpful toward working toward those outcomes and how to practice that kind of feedback so that students can begin to effectively respond to each other.
3) Start small and review more frequently.
Review doesn’t need to happen all at once. Instead, we have found it helpful to isolate learning goals in review activities, and to center reviews around a limited set of criteria, rather than around a holistic evaluation of writing quality. If a goal of your writing assignment, for example, is to make a convincing argument, then it may be helpful to have separate reviews that focus respectively on the quality of students’ claims and the quality of their evidence. Because you are breaking down larger assignments, students would be able to do small review assignments for each other quickly and efficiently in a low stakes way.
4) Use the rubric throughout the entire project, not just for final assessment.
There is plenty of research about the value of using rubrics as instructional tools. In the case of peer review, however, using the rubric as a common document for understanding the nature and purpose of a writing assignment can ensure that peer review provides a large quantity of feedback without sacrificing the quality or richness of that feedback.
5) Check in with your students to see how well it is working.
Despite all the positive benefits of the feedback we’re describing, it’s not going to work without strong pedagogical direction, and at times, intervention. Talk to your students — learn what feedback has been helpful, what hasn’t, and ask for suggestions about what can improve their experience of the process and help your feedback system become more effective.
 
We want to hear from you! What methods do you use for responding to large amounts of student work? What methods haven’t worked? Use the hashtag #ITeachMSU to share your answers with us on Twitter and Facebook.
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Noel Turner, H. & Gomes, M. Methods Not Madness: Five Steps for Responding to Work in Large Classes. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu

The attached PowerPoint is an overview of semester-long course projects as an option for high-impact assessment design. Author, Andrea Bierema has a joint appointment with the Center for Integrative Studies in General Science and the Department of Integrative Biology. In addition to this position, she teaches during the summer at Kellogg Biological Station. Dr. Bierema’s research spans undergraduate biology education and avian communication.
Dr. Bierema has graciously shared examples from her own courses. You can see examples of assignments, peer review, and discussion boards.

A professional development workshop given by Maria Rising on creating successful relationships and aligning expectations with mentors. This was presented at the 2020-2021 Leadership Academy. 
 

We are writing teachers, and in the world of writing, feedback is HOLY. But does that mean we love spending every waking hour responding to student work? Indeed it does not! But because we’re writing teachers, we see lots of writing, and think a lot about how to devise ways of making our lives easier.
 
In this post, and in others, we’ll discuss ways to reduce the amount of concentrated time you spend providing feedback by creatively harnessing classroom resources. We’ve found it essential to distribute the labor of providing feedback across time and people. In other words, don’t do it all at once, and don’t do it all yourself. This week, we offer ways for providing individual feedback once a project is under way.
Teacher-to-Student Feedback: Four Ways to Narrow Your Parameters
Both of us know that sitting with a stack of 50 student papers and no strategy other than “get through them” can be daunting. So, what can you do to strategize?
Do you offer as much feedback as you can muster? Do you let feedback emerge organically from your first read of a project? While there are times when this can be a pedagogically useful approach (usually at the beginning of a project), we’ve found there are more efficient ways to respond. Here are some strategies we’ve used to narrow parameters & get work done:

Ask students to craft one question about their work, and use that question to guide your feedback. Since we teach writing, a question we receive from a student might look something like this: “Does the organization of my paper make sense?” Students’ questions limit the scope of our responses, as long as we insist on only responding to only those questions.
Craft your own question about students’ work, and use that question to guide your feedback. Specific questions can often provide useful feedback (for example, “how well does evidence support the thesis?”). In Matt’s experience, the more specific the question, the less time he spends thinking about how to respond.
Have students identify a specific outcome or assessment criterion they are concerned with, and respond only to that concern. When Matt uses this strategy, the question becomes “What does this student need to do in order to perform better along specific project goals or assessment criteria? What do they need to do to become a more reflective writer (project goal) or to organize their claims effectively (criterion)?” This strategy has the added benefit of prodding him to specifically elaborate on his understanding of outcomes or assessment criteria.
You can identify a specific outcome or assessment criteria too. Maybe you only want to reply to students’ engagement with previous literature — maybe responding to only that one thing will be most pedagogically useful. We get it, it works, it saves time.

Student-to-Student Feedback: Four Ways to Redistribute the Labor of Response
Like we promised earlier, it’s entirely possible to distribute the labor of responding across a class. For example, many of you are probably familiar with peer review, and some of you may even use peer review. Here are a few recommendations we have for facilitating student-to-student feedback activities:

Model feedback for students. Maybe they’ve given feedback to their peers before, maybe they haven’t. Show students what good feedback looks like to you. We like soliciting work from previous and current students and modeling in class how we would respond to that student’s work.
Create effective feedback structures. While some students might do great with open-ended prompts for offering feedback, in general, that feedback will only improve with well-structured prompts you’ve designed.
Do it regularly. Don’t just talk about student-to-student feedback once at the beginning of a course and pray that will be enough to turn them into professional responders. Instead, return regularly to the activity of offering feedback, and talk openly about what kinds of feedback will be most useful at various points in a project.
Call “peer review” something else. Heather likes to call it “feedback.” When she has called the activity “peer review,” she has found students are more likely to gravitate toward line editing, grammar, or what folks in writing studies call “lower-order concerns.” When she stopped calling it “peer review” and started calling it “feedback,” students were more likely to offer “higher-order concerns,” focusing their attention on organization, quality of analysis, ability to synthesize literature, and strength of arguments.

We’d Like to Know: What time-saving methods have you used to respond to your classes once a project is under way? What methods of individual response have you found most effective for your students’ learning? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Gomes, M. & Noel Turner, H. Lighten Your Load: Eight Ways to Make Individual Feedback More Efficient. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu

CATME is a program that helps students work smarter as teams (read more about CATME here). Before being assigned to teams in ISB202, Spring Semester 2020, Students completed this assignment. For this assignment, students were directed to create a CATME profile, practice rating fictitious team members, and complete a survey (which was ultimately to be used to place students in teams).

Dominik’s project focused on building community among graduate students and faculty in the College of ComArtSci by hosting an event series at local bars in East Lansing where graduate students could share their research while tying in personal stories or humorous anecdotes in a laid-back and relaxed setting. Dominik also developed a peer mentoring program for ComArtSci through which older graduate students are paired with new graduate students.