Category: Formative and Summative Feedback


Archive for the ‘Formative and Summative Feedback’ Category

Mar 09 2011

Providing Feedback by Video – John Pell

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“Last semester I began using a screen-capturing software called JING, which allows you to make a short videos (5 minutes) of whatever is on your screen. After having students submit papers electronically, I was then able to create a personalized video that both provided visual representations of areas that needed work (highlighting passages for example, moving paragraphs, etc. ) and my comments in the form of audio track that followed the action of the screen. The students really loved this approach and I was not only able to provide a lot more feedback (I found 5 minutes of speaking to be much more than I could ever write) but it made grading much quicker.”

Mar 10 2010

Assessing and Responding to Student Writing

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Principles of Effective Writing Assessment

The National Council of Teachers of English and the Council of Writing Program Administrators advocate that “effective, meaningful, and responsible writing assessment” should:

  • Place priority on the improvement of teaching and learning,
  • Demonstrate that students communicate effectively,
  • Provide the foundation for data-driven, or evidence-based, decision making,
  • Be informed by current scholarship and research in assessment,
  • Recognize diversity in language,
  • Positively impact pedagogy and curriculum,
  • Use multiple measures and engage multiple perspectives to make decisions that improve teaching and learning,
  • Include appropriate input from and information and feedback for students,
  • Be based on continuous conversations with as many stakeholders as possible,
  • Encourage and expect teachers to be trusted, knowledgeable, and communicative, and
  • Articulate and communicate clearly its values and expectations to all stakeholders.

Excerpted from NCTE-WPA White Paper on Writing Assessment in Colleges and Universities

These principles apply to both program and classroom contexts. Further, NCTE and CWPA emphasize that assessment should be appropriate, fair, and valid. In other words, the assessment should fit the context and the decisions that its results will guide. It should be fair to all assessed groups, and if assessments impact individuals (i.e., impact a grade, a graduation requirement, etc.), the expectations and purposes should be clearly articulated in advance. Finally, the assessment instrument should measure what it purports to measure.

Formative Assessments

Formative assessments, as part of the learning process, help both students and faculty determine what adjustments need to be made to facilitate student achievement of learning goals and course objectives. Formative assessments are most effective when they involve students. Students can participate in formative assessment through:

  • Goal setting
  • Self and peer assessment
  • Student record keeping
  • Reflection

“Responding to writing does not begin when you start to read student essays; it starts much earlier, at the point when the assignment is made.”
(Edward M. White, Assigning, Responding, Evaluating, p. 126)

What formative assessment strategies do you use in ENG 110? At what points in the writing process do you offer formative assessment?

Summative Assessment

Summative assessments gauge, at a particular point in time, students’ learning in relation to course objectives. Our project grades, course grades, and program assessment all can function as forms of summative assessment.

“Teachers’ comments can take students’ attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers’ purposes in commenting.”

Nancy Sommers, “Responding to Student Writing,” p. 148

How well do your summative assessments correspond with the course objectives? What strategies do you use to keep summative feedback focused on a project’s learning goals? On a student’s learning goals? When summative assessments also can function as formative assessments (as with project grades given early- to mid-semester), how do you draw students’ attention to the ways your feedback can inform their future writing?

Formative and Summative Assessment – Balancing both in ENG 110

Writing classes should balance both formative and summative assessments, and formative assessments should occur early enough to allow adjustments to the learning process.

What strategies do you use to manage the paper load associated with facilitating both formative and summative assessment?

Consistency Across Sections/Instructors

To enhance our program assessment, it’s valuable for faculty to routinely discuss how they would score sample papers. These conversations and exercises help us increase consistency in our assessment across sections and instructors. They also give us an opportunity to discuss the learning outcomes associated with our shared ENG 110 course objectives and the General Studies goals that our course supports. Furthermore, these discussions often prompt us to share how we support students’ development towards meeting the learning outcomes in our individual sections of ENG 110.

To facilitate today’s conversation, you received a copy of an ENG 110 assignment (that includes an information literacy component), a sample paper, copies of the program’s direct assessment rubrics, and a scoring rubric. Please take a few minutes to read and score the paper.

What characteristics of the student paper informed your scoring? Where your scores similar to those of others scoring the same paper? Through discussion, were you able to come to consensus?

Oct 14 2009

Peer Response and Other Feedback

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Identifying Goals for Feedback, Framing Questions for Feedback, Point/Summarize/Reflect, Comment Tags for Situated Questions

  • Targeted Feedback – Activity Contributed by Victoria Shropshire
    “I setup a discussion board in BB in which all students must post 2 versions of the introduction to the essay on which they are all currently working, and then their classmates must reply as to which version of the PRG they prefer, and why (emphasis on this latter part).  I post a series of questions to consider for those who need guidance with peer review and then let them at it!  The posts are typically insightful, and the authors really like the “free space” to try out new ideas, but it also forces students to look critically at this particular piece of writing, a skill they can always hone and use towards their own. I try to reply to everyone the first time I use such a DB, but as the semester progresses, I will read them all but only comment on a few.

    “Students are assessed on a complete/incomplete scale so the pressure of assessment is virtually removed. 10 points for the original post, and 5 points each for 2 responses to classmates for a 20 point (total) DB, which is like a quiz grade. I praise really in-depth and insightful responses and mention the need for more substance in ones that are non-committal, but the directions include a few comments about the importance and value of substantial responses, and thus far I am pleased with the result.”

  • Conferencing
  • Rhetorics as Resources: The Academic Writer (Chapter 12), Writing: A Manual for the Digital Age (Chapter 6)

Mar 12 2008

Assessment and Grading as Critical Practices

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What the Assessment Gurus Say:

    • “Responding to writing does not begin when you start to read student essays; it starts much earlier, at the point when the assignment is made.”
      (Edward M. White, Assigning, Responding, Evaluating, p. 126)
    • “As teachers, we know that most students find it difficult to imagine a reader’s response in advance, and to use such responses as a guide in composing. Thus, we comment on student writing to dramatize the presence of a reader, to help our students to become that questioning reader themselves, because, ultimately, we believe that becoming such a reader will help them to evaluate what they have written and develop control over their writing.”
      (Nancy Sommers, “Responding to Student Writing,” p. 148)
    • Nancy Sommers cautions teachers to keep the goal of the assignment in mind when responding to student writing. She notes, “teachers’ comments can take students’ attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers’ purposes in commenting” (“Responding” 149). Sommers suggests striving for continual reinforcement between comments on students’ writing and classroom instruction and activities.
    • Multiple studies reaffirm the importance of addressing surface-level errors within the context of students’ authentic writing, but research also cautions that students are more likely to apply comments about lower order concerns to their future writing if teachers engage in “minimal marking.” In other words, identifying a few (two or three) categories of errors (i.e., articles, commas after introductory clauses, comma splices, etc.) in each project and prioritizing those that interfere with meaning will have more impact on future writing than identifying all errors in the project. (See Haswell for one example of a minimal marking strategy.)