Common assessment and feedback challenges faced in large-enrollment classrooms include the following:
- Grading can be too time-consuming leading to delayed and infrequent feedback to students.
- Assessing student understanding during classtime may be difficult.
- In courses where there are multiple instructors or teaching assistants, consistency in grading and feedback may be a challenge.
- Activities and assessments that work well in smaller classes may need adaptation for use in large courses.
The following suggestions may give you ideas for new ways of doing grading and feedback in your large enrollment course. If you would like help implementing an idea or coming up with a custom solution for your course, contact an instructional designer assigned to your college.
- To save time at the end of the term, enable your course grading scheme in Canvas. Enabling this feature translates the numeric course grade into a letter grade. Your students will be able to see their letter grade. You will be able to automatically import the letter grades into MyRedLinks to an external site. at the end of the term.
- Stagger due dates: Consider staggering assignment due dates if you are teaching multiple courses so you are not grading a bunch of assignments at one time.
- Create rubrics for assignments: Not only can you share these rubrics with students to guide their writing, you can use them for efficient and consistent grading especially if you have TAs or GTAs that grade the writing assignment. Rubrics can be reused across your other courses, which saves you even more time. Note that these rubrics for large classes will most likely be more detailed and contain more criteria to be efficient.
- Implement efficiency strategies for your quizzes and exams: Design exams to allow for rigorous non-proctored exams taken on home computers. Use strategies such as large topical question banks; randomize questions and distractors; automate grading whenever possible; and adjust time allowed for individual questions and overall time to make exams rigorous.
- Two-stage exams (Weiman et al., 2014): Extend learning through two-stage exams. as a productive way for your students to improve their learning. First, students complete and submit the exam on their own individually and then in the next class period have your students answer similar or identical questions or problems in small groups. Students must come to consensus during the second or group stage of the exam and turn in one copy of the exam noting student names and perhaps ID numbers. Some tips to make this work well: Explain why you are doing the exams this way. Allow about 2/3s of the total time for the individual part (50-55 minutes out of 80-minute total. Give most points to the individual exam (85-90% for individual and 15 – 10% for the group part). Assign 3 – 4 students per group so it is not too difficult to come to consensus and allow for everyone’s input. Set a policy that student grades will not be lower than the individual scores. Provide clear instructions especially when transitioning from individual to group parts in the same class session.
- Course Discussions. Use course discussions when you want to assess students' capabilities in writing or speaking about a topic or concept, not as a catch-all way of
building community.
For online discussions, use the Canvas groups tool to randomly assign students to discussion groups where the assignment tool can be used to give feedback to the whole group instead of individuals. For in-class discussions, have students turn to others seated near them, and use the active learning strategy of think/pair/share to facilitate lively discussions. Smaller discussions in groups, rather than commenting before a large class, also makes participation less stressful for introverted students. It works well to pose open-ended questions for students to discuss in their group and then ask volunteers to share their group’s perspectives with the entire class. Setting discussion group roles such as facilitator, scriber, and reporter may also help improve the quality of student discussion. Providing the means for students to report out by by using a student-response system will help instructors guage student understanding during classtime. Provide students with a rubric to self-assess their participation and quality of their discussion. - Scaffold large and more complex assignments like term papers or projects. This approach gives students more frequent feedback, lightens the grading load and results in a higher-quality final product, which in turns lightens the end-of-term grading. In this way, even longer written works become possible in a large class. The version history of electronic documents like Microsoft Word and Google Docs can help ensure each student's work developes over time.
- Use technology for formative assessments such as minute paper, muddiest point, and others used to assess prior knowledge. Recall, and understanding can also be done using Canvas or other technology tools before or during class.
- Gauge student understanding of course content before class sessions using online quizzes. This gives you an opportunity to adapt instruction and may prompt students to do more pre-class preparation.
- Use Peer review or critiques especially for the initial drafts. Explain what to look for in assignments. Ask students to complete a brief form prior to peer review reflecting about what they feel is good about their papers and what, in particular, they want their classmates to look at. In a large class, ask students to share and compare their critiques with two to four other students. You can check in with the groups during class to answer questions. Especially effective is to work through the peer review process with students showing an example assignment and discussing how it could be improved. (Learn more about using peer review in large-enrollment courses and learn how it works with videos from Academic Technologies for instructors and students.)
CANVAS COMMONS CONTENT
To help UNL instructors teach more effectively and efficiently, CTT instructional designers and UNL Libraries have created many modules that are easily imported into your class. Customizing and using this content to teach students about writing, assessing sources, and many other skills that support learning may streamline your course preparation.Wieman, G. Rieger, & C. Heiner, Physics Exams that Promote Collaborative Learning, The Physics Teacher, 52, pp. 51-53 (2014), www.cwsei.ubc.ca/SEI_research/files/Physics/Wieman-Rieger-Heiner_Two-Stage-Exam_PT2014.pdf
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