Which Aesthetic Theory Do Art Teachers at School Use to Grade Their Students?

Grading Student Work

Impress Version

• What Purposes Do Grades Serve?
• Developing Grading Criteria
• Making Grading More Efficient
• Providing Meaningful Feedback to Students
• Maintaining Grading Consistency in Multi-Sectioned Courses
• Minimizing Educatee Complaints about Grading

What Purposes Do Grades Serve?

Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Anderson identify the multiple roles that grades serve:

• every bit anevaluation of student work;

• as ameans of communicating to students, parents, graduate schools, professional schools, and future employers virtually a educatee'soperation in college and potential for further success;

• as asource of motivation to students for continued learning and improvement;

• as aways of organizing a lesson, a unit, or a semester in that grades mark transitions in a course and bring closure to it.

Additionally, grading provides students with feedback on their own learning, clarifying for them what they understand, what they don't understand, and where they can meliorate. Grading likewise provides feedback to instructors on their students' learning, information that can inform future education decisions.

Why is grading often a challenge? Considering grades are used every bit evaluations of pupil work, it'southward important that grades accurately reflect the quality of student work and that student work is graded fairly. Grading with accuracy and fairness tin can take a lot of time, which is often in short supply for college instructors. Students who aren't satisfied with their grades can sometimes protestation their grades in means that cause headaches for instructors. Besides, some instructors find that their students' focus or even their own focus on assigning numbers to student piece of work gets in the style of promoting bodily learning.

Given all that grades exercise and represent, it's no surprise that they are a source of anxiety for students and that grading is often a stressful process for instructors.

Incorporating the strategies below will not eliminate the stress of grading for instructors, but it will decrease that stress and brand the process of grading seem less capricious — to instructors and students alike.

Source: Walvoord, B. & V. Anderson (1998).Constructive Grading: A Tool for Learning and Cess . San Francisco : Jossey-Bass.

Developing Grading Criteria

• Consider the different kinds of piece of work you'll inquire students to practise for your course.  This work might include: quizzes, examinations, lab reports, essays, form participation, and oral presentations.

• For the work that's almost significant to you and/or volition bear the most weight, identify what's most important to you.  Is it clarity? Creativity? Rigor? Thoroughness? Precision? Sit-in of knowledge? Disquisitional research?

• Transform the characteristics you've identified into grading criteria for the work most meaning to y'all, distinguishing excellent work (A-level) from very good (B-level), off-white to good (C-level), poor (D-level), and unacceptable work.

Developing criteria may seem like a lot of work, but having clear criteria can

• save fourth dimension in the grading process

• make that process more consistent and fair

• communicate your expectations to students

• help you to decide what and how to teach

• help students understand how their work is graded

Sample criteria are bachelor via the following link.

• Analytic Rubrics from the CFT's September 2010 Virtual Brownbag

Making Grading More Efficient

• Create assignments that have articulate goals and criteria for cess.  The better students understand what yous're request them to do the more likely they'll practise it!

• Use dissimilar grading scales for different assignments.  Grading scales include:
  • letter grades with pluses and minuses (for papers, essays, essay exams, etc.)
  • 100-point numerical scale (for exams, sure types of projects, etc.)
  • bank check +, cheque, bank check- (for quizzes, homework, response papers, quick reports or presentations, etc.)
  • pass-neglect or credit-no-credit (for preparatory piece of work)

• Limit your comments or notations to those your students can utilise for further learning or improvement.

• Spend more time on guiding students in the process of doing piece of work than on grading it.

• For each significant assignment, constitute a grading schedule and stick to it.

Light Grading – Bear in mind that not every piece of student work may need your full attending. Sometimes it'southward sufficient to grade pupil work on a simplified scale (minus / check / check-plus or fifty-fifty zero points / one signal) to motivate them to engage in the work yous want them to practice. In detail, if you have students practise some small assignment before class, you might not need to give them much feedback on that consignment if you're going to discuss it in class.

Multiple-Choice Questions – These are like shooting fish in a barrel to grade but can be challenging to write. Look for mutual student misconceptions and misunderstandings y'all can use to construct reply choices for your multiple-choice questions, peradventure by looking for patterns in student responses to by open-ended questions. And while multiple-selection questions are great for assessing recall of factual information, they can as well work well to assess conceptual understanding and applications.

Test Corrections – Giving students points back for exam corrections motivates them to learn from their mistakes, which can exist disquisitional in a course in which the material on one test is of import for understanding fabric later in the term. Moreover, exam corrections can actually salvage time grading, since grading the test the first fourth dimension requires less feedback to students and grading the corrections often goes quickly because the student responses are mostly correct.

Spreadsheets – Many instructors use spreadsheets (eastward.g. Excel) to go along runway of student grades. A spreadsheet program can automate almost or all of the calculations you might demand to perform to compute student grades. A grading spreadsheet can also reveal informative patterns in student grades. To learn a few tips and tricks for using Excel as a gradebook accept a look at this sample Excel gradebook.

Providing Meaningful Feedback to Students

• Use your comments to teach rather than to justify your grade, focusing on what you'd near like students to accost in time to come piece of work.

• Link your comments and feedback to the goals for an consignment.

• Comment primarily on patterns — representative strengths and weaknesses.

• Avoid over-commenting or "picking autonomously" students' work.

• In your final comments, ask questions that will guide further inquiry by students rather than provide answers for them.

Maintaining Grading Consistency in Multi-sectioned Courses (for course heads)

• Communicate your grading policies, standards, and criteria to teaching assistants, graders, and students in your form.

• Discuss your expectations about all facets of grading (criteria, timeliness, consistency, grade disputes, etc) with your didactics administration and graders.

• Encourage pedagogy assistants and graders to share grading concerns and questions with yous.

• Use an advisable group grading strategy:
  • take education assistants class assignments for students not in their section or lab to curb favoritism (N.B. this strategy puts the emphasis on the evaluative, rather than the teaching, part of grading);
  • have each section of an exam graded by only one teaching assistant or grader to ensure consistency across the board;
  • accept educational activity assistants and graders grade educatee work at the same time in the aforementioned place and so they can compare their grades on certain sections and arrive at consensus.

Minimizing Pupil Complaints about Grading

• Include your grading policies, procedures, and standards in your syllabus.

• Avert modifying your policies, including those on belatedly work, once you've communicated them to students.

• Distribute your grading criteria to students at the beginning of the term and remind them of the relevant criteria when assigning and returning work.

• Keep in-class discussion of grades to a minimum, focusing rather on course learning goals.

For a comprehensive look at grading, see the chapter "Grading Practices" from Barbara Gross Davis'due southTools for Pedagogy.

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This teaching guide is licensed under a Creative Eatables Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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Source: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/grading-student-work/

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