Feedback and Assessment

Providing Feedback to Teachers
When providing feedback to my instructors (such as when they have curricular ideas), I try to use email because of four advantages it offers:

1. It's in writing so that they can refer to it conveniently


2. It's portable (they can access the feedback wherever they have Internet access)


3. It's asynchronous, so they can access it when they are ready to process my feedback. Any synchronous method might provide feedback at a time that is not optimal for the instructor to consider the feedback


4. Email is an easy way to create dialog with an ongoing transcript

The faculty have preferred to initiate dialogue via email for what I think are similar reasons, with a twist on the synchronicity aspect. While the communication is technically asynchronous, I often respond within minutes so that they can get timely feedback, especially on technical details and yes/no questions. Of course, if I don't know the answer or need to consider a question in more depth, I will not fully respond right away but will always reply promptly with an expected timeframe for the answer or a follow-up question.

I have not tried other modalities for providing feedback. However, I think that a screencast response with voice could be a great way to provide feedback on wiki or ning-based assignment proposals from faculty. A camstudio screencast (see my screencasting blog post) would allow me to provide verbal feedback on a specific aspect of the faculty member's proposal while they see me clicking through their assignment/site. I would be unlikely to email such feedback as even a 2-minute shockwave screencast without sound approaches 3MB, but I could deposit the file in the instructor's personal drive on our network or a provide a link to a web address. I look forward to trying this.

Rubrics
I would not provide instructors with rubric assessments of their work. But they would assess student work with rubrics. I am a huge fan of rubrics because they serve as both an assignment sheet and a time-saving grading tool. I have encouraged my faculty to use them by offering a number of in-service trainings on their development and use and by providing rubric samples and templates on our shared faculty network drive. Once a teacher uses a rubric, she tends to be hooked. They save time. Maybe an hour goes into creating a good rubric, but grading time can be reduced significantly per student as the instructor does not have to write the same summative phrases over and over on each paper (see Beach et al in this week's assigned reading for numerous examples of teachers bemoaning the triteness of writing comments on student writing).

My "Help Topics Wiki" Rubric
I decided to create a rubric for assessing student wikis. Earlier in 5475, we created templates for a wiki assignment (see my blog post on this topic). My wiki project was for computer students to build "help topic wikis" for troubleshooting and problem solving common technology challenges.

I wanted to use time-saving technology to help me create the rubric. I started with Thinking Gear's Rubric Machine, which provided an outstanding 6-step heuristic process for helping you think through what you want students to learn and how you will assess their performance. I highly recommend the site and the process. However, the resulting rubric left much to be desired. There were too few categories that were themselves too verbose. The site lacks a simple editing process or basic rubric generator. Maybe further use would show me how to respond to the heuristics in a way that generates a more desirable rubric, but I wasn't going to master the site in one use. So I recommend using another service for building rubrics based on what you learn with the Rubric Machine.

Rubistar has a great template and allows free building of rubrics. Users do not need to register if they just want to create and print rubrics. To add rubrics to the Rubistar database and access it later, users register and continue using the service for free. There is also a fee-based interactive digital feedback service available. This would help accomplish some of what Beach et al point out in this week's reading--that the assessment method should match the unique aspects of digital writing (multimodality). Another real plus of Rubistar is that you can copy and paste the rubric into Word or Excel without losing formatting! I made an Excel version of the rubric with formulas for easy grade tabulation.

Here is the Rubistar-hosted version of the "Help Topic Wikis" rubric that I brainstormed in Thinking Gear and refined in Rubistar.