This project was developed in response to research and feedback from tutors in the department of Education at the University of York regarding limited student engagement with the assessment and feedback procedures and the time-consuming nature of the marking process.
The initial aims were to develop a descriptive rubric and an online marking tool to speed up the marking process, allowing tutors time to dedicate to meaningful student feedback. Through a tutor consultation process, a descriptive/instructional rubric was developed. The rubric is then presented in a web-based marking app, which allowed tutors to select statements to describe student work as well as offering personalised statements referring to how these were demonstrated or absent in the essay.
The marks data and rubric statements were then transferred directly to a Google Document report and this feedback was then immediately made accessible to students through the use of Google Drive.
Victoria Jack from CELT
Tutors reported high levels of satisfaction with the marking app and students responded positively to feedback. As tutor comments and selected statements feed into a database of feedback, further uses of this data also became apparent. The database can serve as a standardisation tool as the analytics can be fed back to tutors or course leaders and the statistics available through the database can be used to provide grade reports and learning analytics regarding the whole cohort.
The short video below reveals the nuts and bolts of how the Marking application is put together, taking data from a spreadsheet, turning it into a web interface, then assembling the marking into a Google Document.
The areas of assessment, feedback and standardisation of marks are all new to me. I am interested from the perspective of interface design and usability. How can a very data heavy screen ( showing all the statements ) be presented in a way that is still easy to use?
I am also interested in how we can make it easy to design your own rubrics, perhaps collaboratively, then have a slick and usable interface with which marking becomes less of a chore. And lastly, I'm interested in how the end results might improve the student experience, with them receiving more finely grained feedback and advice, in a more timely manner.
Although this is only the first version, the app has demonstrably saved a lot of tutors a lot of time, they loved it. The marking app is a proof-of-concept that shows how we can easily map our data into three different contexts, that are the:
Rubric designer - in this case a spreadsheet
Marking app
Feedback document
A beta version of the app is available here: