Assignment Rubric

 

Plan for implementation:

I am familiar with SpeedGrader in canvas, which makes grading student papers a breeze, with the ability to make comments right on submitted documents (perfect for Term papers), but I often found that I would be repeating myself in the overall comment field which is offered in SpeedGrader (a summary of key criteria they missed points on). I did not realize, until a discussion in a Teaching with Technology class enlightened me, that making a rubric allowed me to grade individual aspects of criteria and leave comments for improvement/why they did not get full points for that specific criteria. While in the future I would like to implement this for other assignments in class such as weekly papers, at this time I applied this technique in my Trauma class for their Final Group Presentation Project. The class already had a rubric for group presentations which, prior to COVID, was handed out to students in class. We had a pdf version of this already posted under our Files Tab. However, many students were confused where to look for the rubric, and overall how to structure their presentation. To apply my newly acquired knowledge of rubrics, I created a rubric under the Presentation Assignment, see Figure 1.

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Figure 1. Rubric created for the final group presentation project in PSY 452: Trauma course.

 

I set the rubric to be the means of assessing their presentations, where myself and other TAs in the course will be able to grade them on individual criteria. I believe having this rubric right there for the student to reference will make the assignment more straightforward. Also for teaching assistants to have the ability to make individual feedback on criteria will allow for the student to have a clear understanding of what they could have done better and where they excelled, instead of getting one single grade for the presentation without seeing what the actual breakdown of points was.

 

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Implementation:

Creating the rubric was super easy and quick. It also allowed me to review what criteria is on the rubric, since a few assignment details tend to change from year to year (depending on the number of students we have in the class) such as longer or shorter presentation length. Creativity portion might be something we plan to change in the future, since I did not find the descriptions given to be a good way to assess whether the criteria was met - multiple people are asleep would be out of student control.  However, this rubric was created by the faculty/TAs in the past and was not up for discussion at this time. One aspect I would like to address in the future is how to grade presentations in bulk. Since these are group presentations, we ask only one student to submit their presentation for the whole group. It would be nice if Canvas, maybe through Group Assignment, would allow us to grade presentations for the whole group, where the same grade and feedback would be applied for each individual in the Group. Otherwise, as of right now, we will have to repeat the same grading feedback for all students in that group - which seems quite time consuming. Or we can split up grading for each individual in the group among the 4 TAs (e.g. TA1 will grade Student1 in the group, TA2 will grade Student2 in the group, etc.) But we will have to communicate amongst ourselves to make sure we are grading and giving the same feedback for each).

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Reflections:

Students responded very well to having a clear rubric for the assignment. During presentations, they kept to the time limit, rotated speakers to make sure all students had a chance to speak and made their presentations really interactive (with videos and images). I also received individual feedback from a few students who were happy to have the rubric clearly define what makes a exemplary presentation vs just a good one. I am happy to report basically all students received a perfect grade on the assignment.

 

I will happily integrate rubrics for all of my assignments, weekly papers, Term Papers, etc. They streamline the process of grading, making sure all students receive the same evaluation and feedback on individual components which need improvement/are completed well. Currently, I have rubrics for papers, but they are not in the same format as mentioned above where points are broken down (4pts, 3pts, etc.) This is something I plan on working on during the summer, so I am well prepared for next year.

 

Steps for Improvement:

As mentioned above, there are a number of improvements I plan to make:

1. Updating rubric criteria, such as point breakdown descriptions for Creativity. I will negotiate this with the Instructor.

2. Finding out if Groups allows me to grade in bulk. I made canvas groups a few weeks ago when we assigned groups, but unfortunately students did not take advantage of these (there is nothing posted in any of the group pages, see Figure 2).

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Figure 2: Group assignments created for the class.

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3. Create rubrics for other assignments in the course and integrate them with assignments. 

4. Connect these rubrics with specific outcomes, as discussed in class. This will require an overhaul of the entire canvas course, but if done once, I believe will be easily imported from year to year.

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