Dear Content Contributor,
It is my pleasure to discuss the issue of effective grading and providing timely feedbacks to our students in a bid to improving our teaching and learning culture. Grading is the process of applying standardized measurements of varying levels of achievement in a course. Grades can be assigned as letters (Generally from A to F), or as a number (for example, 0 to 100). I believe that we need to have an insight into the meaning and importance of effective grading system; from both the faculty and students’ perspectives by reading through this write-up.
Meanwhile, let us look at a review by David Adams titled “Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment”, which appreciates that grading is a powerful tool used by faculty to communicate with their students, colleagues, institutions, as well as external entities. Knowledge is shared through their personal experiences in the classroom and from listening to other faculty from leading institutions at workshops. Teachers were also found to have “spent nearly every day of their teaching lives, wrestling with problems and power, and the paradoxes of the grading system”. Read more
If our concern is to impact long-lasting experience into our students, then evaluation and feedbacks must go together. Tomorrow’s Professors, on their website, published that If students are to benefit from feedbacks, which must not only be timely and frequent, but also useful for improving performance by addressing three areas:what students did well, what students need to improve on, and how to make this improvement. Feedbacks can take a variety of forms: 1) formative/summative, 2) individual/group, 3) written/coded comments, and 4) charts and rubrics of essential characteristics of assignments. Read More .
Click here on how to “Give Feedback to Students: 20 Tips to Do It Right”.
Lastly, Mary Clement has suggested three steps that could lead to better course evaluation as each semester’s end comes the often-dreaded course evaluation process by asking: Will the students be gentle and offer constructive criticism, or will their comments be harsh and punitive? What do students really want out of a course, anyway? Points to reflect upon? Meanwhile, a better time to think about course evaluations is at the beginning of the semester. At that point, an instructor can be proactive in three areas that I have found could lead to better course evaluations. Read more
Thank you.
Dr. O. Folorunso
Director, Centre for Innovation and Strategy in Learning and Teaching (CISLT)
