How can I give feedback and grade student work?
Feedback is one of the most critical parts of the learning process. This section provides an overview on evaluating your students’ work and managing your grades and feedback with technologies supported by the Office of eLearning.
Communicating before and after an assignment
Start with clear instructions, a direct assignment prompt, and grading criteria. Explicit instructions reduce confusion and the number of emails that you may receive from your students requesting clarification on an assignment. Your assignment instructions should detail:
- Length requirements
- Formatting requirements
- Expectations of style, voice, and tone for writing assignments
- Acceptable structure for reference citations
- Due date(s)
- Technology requirements needed for the assignment
- Description of the measures used to evaluate success
Offer meaningful feedback and a timely response when grading. There are many ways to provide feedback to students on submitted work. Regardless of the grading strategy and tool that you choose, there are a few best practices to consider when providing student feedback:
- Feedback should be prompt. Send feedback as soon as possible after the assignment to give students an adequate amount of time to reflect before moving on to the next assignment.
- Feedback should be equitable. Rubrics can help ensure that students are receiving consistent feedback for similar work.
- Feedback should be formative. Meaningful feedback focuses on students’ strengths and shares constructive areas to further develop their skills.
Using rubrics to grade consistently
Create customized rubrics for your assignments. A well-designed rubric:
- Provides clear criteria for success that help students produce better work and instructors to be consistent with grading.
- Points out specific areas for students to address in future assignments.
- Allows for consistency in grading and more meaningful feedback.
Rubrics can be added to the directions section of an assignment or assessment as a file upload. We recommend making it available as a download link in your lessons tool as well.
Resources
- Using Rubrics (Cornell University)
Managing student submissions
Use Isidore Gradebook to manage student submissions and grades. In the Gradebook, you can enter and manage student grades and feedback for your course in an easy-to-use spreadsheet format. Some tools in Isidore, such as Assignments, Tests & Quizzes, or Forums, either automatically grade assessments or automatically populate your manually entered grades into the Gradebook. Grades that are automatically populated from a Isidore tool will show up with a “lock” icon. If you want to change or override the grade, you need to go to the tool where the grade came from.
You can also create columns in the Gradebook to manually enter grades and organize grades into categories. Categories can be used to assign weighted grades to student work and automatically drop grades in a specific category. All grades can be exported to a CSV file to keep track outside of Isidore.
Resources
- Gradebook help site for Isidore.
- How do I set up the Isidore Gradebook?
- How do I add items to the Isidore Gradebook?
- How do I enter and edit grades in the Isidore Gradebook?
Next Steps
- Review What assessment tools are available? to select the appropriate tool(s) for grading your students' work.
- Join us for one of our training sessions.
Go to Topic 7: How do I conduct student presentations if a student is remote?