“Designing and Using Grading Forms for On-line Assignments”

Purpose of presentation: The target audience is on-line instructors in any discipline who are troubled by our current students’ two great writing issues: failure to observe the manuscript conventions of written Standard American English and conscious or unconscious plagiarism. Using grading forms also makes it easier for instructors to provide individualized feed back, something that surveys of on-line students report that they crave.

Objectives of the presentation: Dr. Engberg (assisted by Judith Osterman and Robert Behunin) will describe the grading form and its uses. Here is what one might look like: it is a chart with at least four columns and four-to-ten rows. The left-hand column lists the criteria that are to be applied. The remaining columns, moving from left to right across the chart, are labeled at the top “Excellent,” “Hits the Mark,” and Misses the Mark.” The columns thus labeled describe what constitutes (1) an excellent performance of each criteria, then (2) a minimally acceptable performance, then (3) failure; in other words, “A” work, “C” work, and “F” work.

Blackboard’s WebCT Vista 4 provides a grading form tool which permits alteration of the default example to increase the number of rows up to seventeen and the number of columns up to seven. The criteria descriptors and column headings can also be customized. Once a form is designed, the Vista 4 computer program will attach it either to an assignment in the Discussions tool or in the Drop Box tool. Subsequently, the computer program presents a blank copy of this grading form for the instructor to use in grading each student’s submission; the resulting numerical grade is stored in the Grade Book, and the completed form is made visible to the student. If the class platform does not provide a Grading Form tool, the form may be built in WORD, marked and totaled manually, and sent to the student as an attachment to an e-mail.

Practical applications: The advantages of using grading forms for the instructor are many. When the criteria are divided about half and half between form and content, the grading form guides the instructor’s response to both. The content criteria can be tailored to each different assignment. Indeed, the more specific the content criteria are, the easier the form is to use. Thus, the forms are adaptable to many disciplines beside English.

There are also advantages for the students. In Vista 4, the computer program automatically makes grading forms available to students within the tool where the response is to be posted. If this does not happen, the instructor can send copies of the WORD version of the grading form to the students as an attachment or store a copy for them somewhere on the class site. Then, prior to submitting the assignment, students will know what the assignment’s objectives are. They can even estimate their own grades by judging their work the same way the instructor will.

Relationship to the conference theme: This presentation fits under the “Teaching methodology–Educational assessment” heading.

Information to support what is advocated: Dr. Engberg was asked by UNLV’s Director of Distance Education, Judith Osterman, to experiment with grading forms in her junior-senior level on-line classes during academic year 2007-8. During the fall semester, she tried out a generalized grading form for 500-word essays in Mythology, and Religion in Literature, but also designed separate forms for seven grammar topics in Principles of Modern Grammar. She also tried them on both language- and literature-topic papers of 1800-2200 words. During the spring semester, she designed and used specific grading forms for seven different 500-word essays and one lyric explication paper in Middle English literature, and for six exercises and three papers in Linguistics for English Majors. Also, for the spring semester, she set up a test project with Dr. Robert Behunin (Utah State University) to compare the grading of 500-word essays as he was accustomed to do it in his on-line Mythology class against the results attained by using grading forms.

2nd-Day Hands On: “Trying out Grading Forms”
Participants, working from descriptions of two actual on-line assignments, will discuss designing grading forms for these two assignments. Then, they will be given two student written responses to each of these two assignments so that they may try using their grading forms on actual student work.[If we have a computer lab, we will build WORD tables; otherwise we will use blank tables on paper. Calculations will have to be done by hand.]

Biography
Now in her thirty-ninth year of teaching at UNLV, Dr. Engberg received her Ph.D. in English Philology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969. Her specialties include Old and Middle English language and literature, Latin, Descriptive Linguistics, Mythology, and Bible as Literature. She developed her first on-line course (Mythology) in WebCT in 1999; since then she has developed ten additional Sophomore, Senior and Graduate level courses plus introductory Latin and now teaches entirely on-line using Web Campus (Blackboard/WebCT Vista 4.