First, sorry if you came here under false pretenses. This is about doing multiple drafts of a grading run, not grading drafts of student papers. Stick around, though! Shoot, lost 'em. Oh well, here are my thoughts about this anyways.
I like to grade on the bus when I have time where I can't do much else. I don't have internet on the bus and I don't own a smart phone. When I started grading papers with my voice I thought I'd have to give up the bus part but I found the bus time could still be useful if I printed out the paper to read on the bus and then screencast my comments later.
Today on the bus I realized that I really like this new set up. Have you ever marked up a paper, putting tons of effort into a comment on a particular page and then later realized that they fixed the problem on a later page? I used to hate that because I'd have to back to the earlier comment and cross it out or add "nevermind" or something. With this new system of mine they never see the paper copy so I can mark it up any way I like. I don't have to worry about mistakes I make because the student will never see them.
All I have to do is make sure there's enough there for me to know what I was thinking when I get around to screencasting my comments to the student. This is usually the next day but sometimes a few days go by before I remember to do it. When I see a crossed out comment or "nevermind" I know to just skip that, or, possibly, comment to the student that the order of the paper was a little different than I thought it should have been.
The other thing I like about my bus system is that I go through the whole stack of papers before doing my final "draft" of grading with the screencasts. This helps me normalize my grading.
It's funny how I encourage my students all the time to use a drafting process on things and now I'm seeing a similar benefit in my own grading. I'd love to hear how others have benefited. Use the comments or let me know on Twitter @arundquist
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Hi Andy,
ReplyDeleteI never thought of what I do as draft grading, but I have a multi-step grading process. I mark the journal articles that I get my upper-div lab students to write using a rubric (which borrows VERY heavily from one that I got form Greg Severn of the University of San Diego) that has categories of completeness of experiment, error analysis, correctness of physics and experimental description, formatting, level of prose composition, level of sentence syntax, diction, and math as prose.
As I go through the paper my first time, I make notes and point to which rubric category the comment applies. I will call these "line comments". Afterward I look over all the line comments and decide what level of achievement they have met on the rubric and give them some detailed general feedback for that rubric category. Let's call that "category feedback". While I am doing this I will often pull notes from the line comments into the category feedback and then leave a placeholder comment in the line comments ("see rubric comments for more details" type things). I give them the category feedback and the line comments as well since this is the easiest way for them to go through and correct stuff.
I usually do the initial line comments on the computer unless its a nice day and I want to mark outside or something like that and then I mark up the paper and transfer line comments over.
I see this process as being similar to keeping a good logbook in the lab and then writing up a quick report to present to my research group (when I was a grad student). It's two stages, but they are very intertwined. The quick report focuses on big picture with a few important details, but if anybody asks any detail questions, you pull out the logbook to search for those answers.
By the way, I am a huge anti-fan of those times when I write a couple of sentences on student work and have to go back later and cross it out with a "nevermind" or "ignore" because I find something later that negates my comments or I just realize that I was wrong.
Modeling the draft/improvement process is a powerful way to show your students that it's actually important to refine yourself. In my own teaching I don't think I did very much of this - I was swamped! More and more I'm realizing that whenever we want to teach something, we should look to see if we're doing it ourselves.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
@joss I really like your description of how you grade lab reports. That's exactly what I was grading on the bus yesterday. Have you thought of doing scasts for them as well?
ReplyDelete@Riley It's funny how you mention modeling. I was just realizing that while I am definitely doing a drafting process, I don't actually share with the students that I'm doing it (unless they read my blog, of course).