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[ICTs in English] Weekly Update - ICTs and the Amalgamation of Feedback and Marking


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  • From: Hamish Chalmers <hchalmers AT ashs.school.nz>
  • To: ictenglish AT lists.tki.org.nz
  • Subject: [ICTs in English] Weekly Update - ICTs and the Amalgamation of Feedback and Marking
  • Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2012 11:13:57 +1200

Giving students feedback on high-stakes artefacts of work is a time consuming process and challenging to do really well. I think this is particularly true of English where we have such a wide range of possibilities when giving feedback and want to be giving the most helpful feedback in as helpful a way as possible.

Then there’s marking. That point where we hand out a grade, in some cases a high one and in others, despite having given a plethora of helpful (at least we hope so) feedback we have to dish out a measure that doesn’t quite seem to equate to all the hard work many students have put in. In the past, these two steps have been quite separate for me and I’ve organised my time in a way which mostly supports this separation. This has been challenged in the last few years by research which has found that summative feedback on work is limited, at best, in it’s ability to help students learn.

It’s been interesting to see how much ICTs have blurred the relationship between formative feedback and summative feedback via grading. I remember timetabling particular hand-in points for students working on writing in the past and after giving two separate lots of feedback, taking in their hand-written work a third time and spending all weekend figuring out grades. During the feedback phases, I would spend roughly the same amount of time on each piece of work, even though I knew some students would spend less time than others acting on the feedback and I would tend to give rather impressively large amounts of feedback. At least I felt it was impressive but I started to get suspicious that the bulk of my students found it either tiring, intimidating or both. I’d always try to solve this with verbal assistance as soon as possible but have always found this challenging given the number of students we have in our classes.

With the use of e-portfolios, google docs, blogging and microblogging tools (inset more ICTs here please! All you need to do is hit reply!!! ;) things have completely changed. Now, as well as not having to carry a pile of papers home in the weekend and worrying about whether the cats will get hold of one and drag it under the couch, we can give feedback whenever the student has made a change on their work. Hopefully this will be soon enough (and specific enough) to be helpful. Also, we don’t need to worry about ethical questions around giving more feedback help to students who work harder and worrying quite as much about what we’re not doing to engage the ones who aren’t. Instead we can just give further feedback to whichever student has “resolved” their google doc feedback comments and pay a personal visit to verbally assist the ones who haven’t quite understood what our feedback was getting at. +10 for efficiency imo.

The other awesome thing about ongoing electronic feedback using ICTs is when it comes to marking time. With regular any-time ICT assisted feedback we may already have a solid idea of what grade to give by the time we need to hand back a grade. Rather than taking home a pile of work in the weekend and trying to refresh our brains about which piece of work is which because we’ve only seen them once or twice over a few weeks, we’re instead looking at work we’ve given quick feedback on seven or eight times over the same period. Shorter, more focused, regular feedback, I think, is far better than massive skews of it once or twice over a unit. With the massive skews method we’re also less able to get round all students the following period because the verbal follow up all ends up needing to happen in the same class.

So in essence, electronically assisted feedback (perhaps one day this will mean robots are helping actually create the feedback but in the interim I just mean assisted by handy ICTs) gives us opportunities to provide more feedback, more often and in a more specific manner. And if this sounds tiring, it can also really cut down on the time spent summatively marking at the end! More and more I’m starting to think of giving students summative and formative feedback (at least with internals) as being one and the same thing. Thanks to good old ICTs! Three cheers for technology!

So what other ICTs are there that can help us with giving students feedback on their work?

Hamish Chalmers
Facilitator: ICTs in English
http://englishonline.tki.org.nz/


  • [ICTs in English] Weekly Update - ICTs and the Amalgamation of Feedback and Marking, Hamish Chalmers, 09/23/2012

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