Outcomes Assessment and Grades

A couple of recent articles in Inside Higher Ed caught our eye – one on grades and grade inflation, and the other on the creation of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment.

It seems obvious to us that grading and assessment are largely the same thing. Barring sampling programs, or initiatives designed to assess program outcomes (aggregating student results rather than considering the success of individuals), grading IS assessment.

It’s just that the typical grade (A-, B+ etc.) is an extraordinarily blunt instrument.

Imagine reading a car review (okay, bad example – who is reading car reviews anymore?) or a film review that is simply a letter grade. Many reviews feature letter grades, but they come after a thousand words of measured criticism. And it is subjective criticism, but we largely accept the skill of a Roger Ebert and take their points seriously. They are assessing the film, and they do it through a narrative response built upon well-established criteria.

Education is even messier than film reviewing, because the letter grades awarded are all over the place. To draw the analogy out a little farther, imagine trying to pick a movie to see from the following:

• 20 films, all rated B+ or higher (with no narrative or other information)
• 20 films, each rated four times by separate reviewers, where the individual grades are all over the map but the averages are still B+ or higher

You wouldn’t know which film to see…and likewise our system of letter grades is useless for assessing knowledge.

Effective Peer Review: Leveraging the Learning Management System

Introduction

Peer review is a widely accepted practice, particularly in writing classes, from high school through college and graduate school. The goal of peer review is typically two-fold:

1. To help students get valuable feedback at the draft stage of their work.
2. To help students more deeply understand the goals of the assignment.

Unfortunately, peer review is often used as a busy-work activity, or a process that takes advantage of conscientious students while allowing others to do superficial work. For instance, many teachers will hand out a list of peer review questions in class, and then give students 30 minutes to review two papers written by their colleagues. An open-ended question might be:

• “Did the writer adequately summarize and discuss the topic? Explain.”

Many students will write “Yes” under this question and move on. Without review by the instructor (difficult to do when many instructors have 50 to 150 students), these students can destroy the social contract of a peer review. Other students will spend a lot of time making line edits to the draft – correcting grammar, making minor changes to sentences etc. At the draft stage this is probably inappropriate – the focus should be on ideas and big-picture organization, not embroidery. Plus, some students aren’t qualified to be dictating where the semicolon should go.

Students aren’t alone in having these problems; in 1982, Nancy Sommers published her highly influential piece, “Responding to Student Writing,” in which she commented about how little teachers understand the value of their commenting practices, and that, essentially, they don’t know what their comments do. She raised numerous long-standing points in her evaluation of teachers’ first and second draft comments on papers.

Two of her major findings:

1. Teachers provide paradoxical comments that lead students to focus more on “what teachers commanded them to do than on what they are trying to say” (151).
2. She found “most teachers’ comments are not text-specific and could be interchanged, rubber-stamped, from text to text” (152). One result is that revising, for students, becomes a “guessing game” (153). Sommers concluded by saying, “The challenge we face as teachers is to develop comments which will provide an inherent reason for students to revise” (156).

Assessing Critical Thinking

Many of our users know about the Waypoint Public Library – a shared library of both Assignments and Elements created by our clients. Each month we’ll highlight a unique approach to assessment and feedback and make it easy for you to copy and utilize it.

As a first installment we thought we’d start with a double-shot of critical thinking, a crucial skill difficult to assess and of interest to educators from middle school through graduate school. These Assignments don’t formally address “critical thinking” as a skill, but seek to differentiate summarizing facts from making original connections while synthesizing information.

There are two versions of this Waypoint Assignment: one intended for peer review (pdf), and the other for an instructor (pdf) to use. Specific references (to writing handbooks etc.) have been removed. You can easily copy these Assignments from the Public Library and edit them to suit. The two Assignments are:

• Critical Thinking/Writing (SubMet Library) 7/10/08
• Critical Thinking/Writing Peer Review (SubMet Library) 5/30/08

They both make use of Checklists, but you’ll notice that the first few Observations in the instructor versions have traditional ‘rubric’ choices. So the detailed Observations could be easily dropped and the Checklist Element converted to a Performance Element.

>> Read more about copying an Assignment from the Public LIbrary
>> See the detailed version of the instructor Assignment
>> See the detailed version of the peer review Assignment

Sophisticated Rubrics and and the Power of Feedback

We recently presented on a simple change to collecting work from students: ask them to include a cover letter, addressed to the instructor, with their submission of work. This cover letter should reflect upon the previous feedback they have received (from instructors and, most recently, their peer reviewers if applicable). It could also give the reader an overview of the goals of their work and specify areas in which they (the student) are most interested in receiving feedback.

We thought it useful to illustrate this process with examples.

The following example is from a college-level writing class where students were studying the effect of war on culture (and vice-versa). They were given the following assignment:

We will read some articles about Iraq, it’s effects, a history of horror movies, and a detailed account of the US involvement in Somalia.

Project 1 is an academic paper: formal diction, MLA citation formatting, credible research – the works. In four or five pages (1,000 to 1,250 words), you will make an original argument concerning the impact of art on war, or conversely war on art. By ‘art’ we mean the visual arts, music, film, novels – almost any creative undertaking. You can be quite liberal in your selection…just be prepared to defend the choice.

The key here is originality. Did Woodstock influence the Vietnam War? It’s probably easy to argue that it did (and also that it didn’t, since we were in Vietnam for another 6 years). Did the poetry of Wilfred Owen horrify the English so much that they avoided a second war with the Germans? No. And neither of these approaches would make a worthy paper.

Your four to five page paper must have at least three credible sources (not including the assigned work for the class).

It is worth noting that the students read several lengthy articles reviewing pop-culture icons (like the Saw series of films) that argued deep connections to more serious issues than the students might at first see. So they were set up to engage intellectually with material of their own choosing, and connect it to a war. There were several Harry Potter essays, but the results were satisfyingly diverse.

Here is an example cover letter from a student:

Example cover letter: Click for a larger image

Here is the rubric used to assess and respond to the student, as it appears in Waypoint (interactive rubric software – the rubric could be translated to a paper-based approach):

Rubric used to assess and respond: Click for a larger image

This student received the following feedback, along with an annotated document (created in Microsoft Word, then appended to the feedback in Waypoint), from the instructor:

Feedback to student: Click for a larger image

Needless to say, this kind of feedback is unusual in any educational setting – but the above was created in about 8 minutes, and the cover letter process (along with other tips and tricks) helps make sure the process is constructive and useful.

It is worth noting that this assignment was given in the middle of the academic term, so the students could be expected to learn from the feedback, then apply it in a final project that did not receive this kind of detailed feedback.