Use a comment bank incorporating up to ten criteria to provide timely and thorough feedback to many students
Simon Parker, All stage 1 students from the School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development
I developed an excel spreadsheet to record student assessment results. For each assessment criteria (up to 10 differing marking criteria) relating to a given assignment I have created 5 different tiered written responses (1 indicating poor quality and 5 being excellent). Each set of responses is thorough and relates directly to the specific criteria being assessed. Once all criteria are marked, the written feedback is merged into a word document, which is then sent to the student using e-mail merge. There is a delay of about 5 days between sending the written feedback comments and the actual grade to encourage the students to read their comments and try to ‘self mark’. The spreadsheet is used to generate quantitative results which are then sent the students.
It was proving impossible to provide thorough, useful, written feedback to nearly 200 students in the available time period. This is a system to try to enable individualised, personalised feedback in a limited time period, allowing students to use the feedback gained to improve their next work.
I am able to mark within 10 days of the students submitting their assignment whilst enabling feedback to be specific to each student and specific to the criteria being assessed. Students were asked to indicate their experience of feedback using a survey in Blackboard, those that responded report that feedback is useful.
Providing timely and thorough feedback to students using a comment bank.
Assessment and Feedback, Student Engagement, Technology Enhanced Learning
Undergraduate (Stage 1)
Agriculture, Food and Rural Development
Up to 200 students in a group
Other (please specify below)