How Much Feedback Can You Give On Projects?

When grading student projects the easiest thing in the world is to assign a grade and give that as the sole feedback to the student. It requires the minimum amount of work and it satisfies the need to have something in the grade book. Doing that always frustrated me as a classroom teacher. I just didn’t see how a mere was contributing to the learning experience. And yet writing out detailed critiques and highly individualized essays just takes too much time. This is especially true if you assign a lot of projects and have a number of classes doing them. The minutes add into hours very quickly. Its a problem.

What I eventually did was to create a little program that I used to help me grade. basically this program read in a comma delimitated text file that included comments – advice, praise, credit, things missing, etc. These comments would be displayed on a form with checkboxes next to them. I would check off all that applied and fill in a textbox that was provided for things I didn’t anticipate. As I reviewed the project I would check off the boxes and the grade would be calculated. I did have an option for tuning that somewhat but since I was usually pretty clear on what expectations were missing those requirements usually dictated the grade. I also allowed for bonus points. The results would be saved to still another file and/or printed out.

The students received a pretty detailed report on what they did right, left out, got extra credit for and so on. This was by no means perfect but it was a start. I was also able to look at the ending comments and get a good feel for what topics were covered well and which not so well. this was very useful to me in determining where review was required and where I needed to change things next time I taught that material.

There was/is still a part of me that would have loved to have spent some time individually with each student doing a code review of their projects. Not really practical I’m afraid. I did try to find some pieces of code worth going over with the class and I like to think that was helpful. And sometimes there was a student (or two) who really needed some 1 to 1 time – usually after school – to “get it.” Tough to find that time sometimes with students having sports and work and homework and ones one desire to have a life. But a lot of good learning (for me as well as the student) happened when those things did work out.

I wish we could always teach everything one teacher to one student but that isn’t practical. So we walk the line between enough and not enough. What sort of things to you do to provide more feedback in less time and effort on your part?