On AI grading of student writing

^{I was an English language arts, and social studies teacher for 20 years. The worst part of my job by far was evaluating essays. Even if we resist machine grading by AI for now, it will eventually be here to stay. And even if the AI grading isn’t perfect, we can work on our prompts to make it better and better. As a human grader/evaulator, despite my best intentions, I am certain that my essay evaluations were likely uneven. If I had 40 essays to mark, while they were hopefully fairly consistent. I’m sure there were still inconsistencies and I’m certain that I gave better feedback to some students than others.}

^{Perhaps the most important thing to consider is that it takes a human a long time to grade 40 or 60 essays, especially if you aim to provide helpful feedback. If AI can provide reasonable and consistent and immediate feedback to our students as writers, I don’t think it is fair to ask them to wait for two weeks while a human marks a whole stack of essays to hand back at once.}

Perhaps the human marks the final essay, or the final draft of the essay. In the in between, however, I think we need to consider teaching our students how to ethically use generative AI to access immediate and specific feedback about parts of their writing.

I know there are lots of other points to consider, but as a life-long English teacher, I believe AI is a path to a better way of assessing.

Thoughts?

Digital Portfolios 2.0 – Collecting Portfolio links in Google Classroom

Digital Portfolios 2.0 is a series of blog posts describing the carefully crafted steps and scaffolds put in place to help a high school reinstate the use of Digital Portfolios. 

Teachers must have a convenient way to follow up with students to ensure that each “course” portfolio page is complete. In addition, teachers might use a simple rubric (see below) to assess quality or do a completion checklist. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize sooner that teachers needed some help and support in the follow-through. I wish I had helped some of the earlier teachers and classes set up this simple workflow, but this is a case of better late than never. Hopefully, at least a few teachers will follow this simple Google Classroom workflow to help determine the extent to which their students have completed the digital portfolio post for each of their courses.

To make this easy for teachers, here is a workflow for collecting an appropriate Google Site link in Google Classroom.

Super important warning: If students submit an “edit” link to their Google Site, or “upload” their Google Site from their Google Drive, they will lose all edit access and the Google Classroom teacher will become the temporary owner.

Use the italicized text below to paste into the “Instructions” section of your Google Classroom Assignment:

Use the “link” option to submit the link to your Google Site Portfolio Page. 
Be sure that:

• you click “Publish” to update your site
• you go back to the Publish button, click the little arrow, and choose “View Published Site”
• copy the link from this published page
  • your link needs to have the name of your class at the end (Bio 20 eg. https://sites.google.com/prrd8.ca/sus…)
• click Turn In/ Submit
• NOTE: as long as you continue to “Publish” your site, the most recent version will show up for your teacher

This clipped portion of the previous video shows students how to get the link they need for submission to the Google Classroom Assignment. In addition, this pre-written Google Classroom instructions text is in the YouTube video description.

Assessing the Digital Portfolio Page

At the very least, teachers should track the completion of the digital portfolio page for their courses as complete or incomplete. Assigning a grade will also support the importance of the digital portfolio. Here is the link to the rubric below. Feel free to edit this rubric or use a tool like magicschool.ai/ to generate your own rubric.

Review this YouTube video for suggested formatting for an EBHS Digital Portfolio page in Google Sites.

Digital Portfolios 2.0 – No Student Left Behind

Digital Portfolios 2.0 is a series of blog posts describing the carefully crafted steps and scaffolds put in place to help a high school reinstate the use of Digital Portfolios. 

Nothing will deflate a project like this more quickly than when teachers go to do the portfolio curation work with students a month or two down the road and scores of students don’t even have their Google Site created. The effort that we put into this “in-between” phase seems mundane but was crucial to the process continuing as smoothly as possible in months to come.

As described in this previous post, the Google Form collection of the published links served as “completion proof”. It was also super helpful as we systematically tried to have advisory teachers track down and help students get their portfolio completed if they missed the “gymnasium Google Sites creation day”.

As instructional coaches, we took on the task of having advisory teachers either a) confirm that their entire class had successfully created portfolios or b) send a list of absent students. We then spent the next two weeks or so sending very frequent email reminders to teachers who had not responded to the confirmation request, or who had students who needed to have portfolios completed. We offered to come and do mini-tutorials for any remaining students; many teachers took us up on this. Other teachers used the paper instruction booklet, or the Google Sites tutorial poster to help students on their own.

To help in this process, we used the spreadsheet connected to the “Link Collection Form” that collected students’ Google Sites “edit” link and “published” link. Students were organized by homeroom teacher for easier tracking. Another tab on this Google Sheet had all of the Homeroom Teachers’ names and either a ✅ when all students in their group had the portfolio completed or a list of students who still needed to create their Site. This was tedious record keeping, but really helped to achieve near 100% Google Sites creation.

This “in-between” blitz was a success. When we returned to the school in later months to help classes add their portfolio content, it was rare to encounter a student who had not yet created their Google Site. The few times that did happen, we could use the great tools that we had previously produced to quickly get the students up to speed.

The next step: helping teachers help their students add course content to their digital portfolio.

Great Seesaw updates

‘Tis the season of tech company updates! Your inbox is likely full of emails from tech companies as they tout their fall updates. Seesaw has some huge updates like their addition of formative assessment capabilities, but there are some smaller updates that are super useful for teachers.

Be sure to check out these Seesaw updates.

1. Present to class

This is one of those that you realize that, yes… I really needed this. It allows a quick way to use Seesaw as a teaching canvas to either demonstrate an activity that you will be assigning or just to use the tools to show concepts.

This video provides an overview of how to use and access the “Present Acivity to Class” feature:

2. Create groups

The new Groups feature makes it easy to create and modify student groups. These groups can be used to differentiate and assign different tasks to different groups. There is much flexibility as students can be in several groups at the same time, you can choose a custom name, and you can choose a unique icon for each group or upload a photo icon to represent them.

Check out this video for how to create and manage your new groups!

Post COVID High School Assessment Crisis?

A first draft… putting this into the world for some feedback…

In the past few weeks, I have had teachers from several junior and senior high schools reach out to me as an Instructional Coach with a plea that sounds like this:

My colleagues and I are just crying together about these students and their lack of test-taking strategies.  We are very frustrated with the grade 12 class.  They do NOT prepare themselves for exams and then they have ZERO test-taking strategies.  

Acutually, this is untrue – as teachers we talk about this a LOT in class but we obviously need a new angle.  Any suggestions? 

A High School Teacher

This is not a new or particularly unusual discussion, so my first reaction was to send some resources, and screencasts demonstrating some strategies to increase engagement when reviewing tests and test-taking. However, the frequency and urgency with which I have been getting similar messages from teachers across my district recently has caused me, a former high school English and Social Studies teacher, to really pause and consider what factors might be at play.

Here are some things that might have shifted recently, and thus, as high school teachers, we need to realize that ‘the way we’ve always done review and test preparation might also need to shift.

1. Previously, by the time a student was in grade 12, they would have had a full high school career of various teachers in various subjects teaching them test-taking skills and strategies.
2. Previously, tests in high school in my district might be worth up to 30 or 40 % for a final exam; pre-COVID our provincial grade 12 final “diploma exams” were worth 30% of a student’s overall mark. (If we go back to 2017, those same diploma exams were worth 50% of the final grade.)
3. Consider that during COVID, those provincial diploma exams were cancelled for several semesters, and districts generally followed suit with similar policies for ALL grade 7-11 final exams as well. When those grade 12 diploma exams were finally reinstated, they were worth 10% of the final grade, and now this semester they are worth 20% of the final grade. There is a significantly different level of concern when an exam is worth 10 or 20 % than if it is worth 30 or 50 %. In some cases, districts and schools are still mandating that a single or final exam cannot be worth more than 20 % of a student’s final mark. (Do we assume that this is because they are still fragile test-takers as a result of COVID?)
4. And then consider that those 20 % diploma exams often have two parts: a multiple choice portion and an essay portion, written on two separate days. So now that multiple-choice final exam is only worth 10% of a student’s overall mark. If I am a student, to what extent can I be convinced that I should invest copious time and energy to learn skills and strategies for a test worth 10 % of my final mark.
5. If you are a student in about grade 9-12 right now, you have missed out on two or more years of previous teachers helping you navigate “test-taking”. So even if you thought that it was important to study for an exam worth 20% of your mark, you probably really do not know how to go about it.
6. Even the youngest, newest teachers wrote high school diploma exams that were worth at least 30%. They likely had in-school final exams worth at least that much or more. Their sense of the “importance” of being able to write a test will still be in line with that of the more seasoned teachers who have worked most of their careers with the constant pressure of diploma exam student performance.

In the end, do we mostly have a disconnect in what is deemed valuable or worthwhile as a time and energy investment? Are today’s high school students apathetic about exams and studying because a) it is extra difficult because they have not had repeated practice and exposure due to COVID exam policies and/or b) the exams are worth such a small percentage of their overall grade that they just decide to save their energy and take their chances?

These are some of the factors that have helped me frame the nature of the challenge. The landscape is different than it was five years ago when high school teachers lamented about students who couldn’t be bothered to study.

But alas, although I’m understanding some elements of the problem, I am no closer to solutions! Nevertheless, here are some thoughts and strategies that I would use to chip away at the issue. (Based on the assumption that although the exams do not carry as much weight as they used to, parental and district performance expectations will remain the same.)

Can we approach post-test review and answer analysis as an activity based on data? I think it is important to be able to produce data to show students the answer statistics on each question, or especially those questions with low success rates. Why were student answers split into the choices that students made? The following ideas are to replace the procedure where the teacher goes through the entire “marked and returned” test or quiz question by question – this is a painful waste of time for most students and there is almost NO learning about the test or testing process achieved as the process is entirely passive.

1. Have students complete multiple choice tests individually at first. (If it is a quiz or practice test with fewer than 15 questions, I like to have students fold their papers in half and number each half with the same numbers. Their individual answers go on one side, then the group answers from the steps below go on the other side. This becomes useful data for the student and/or the teacher) Then with the tests still unmarked, have students work in groups of 2 to 4 to discuss answers.

• Option 1: After discussing a question with groupmates, students do not need to come to consensus and can choose to stick with their original answer or switch. This type of rich debate furthers the learning and the thinking about a question or topic, which is really more important for increasing understanding than simply completing a multiple-choice test. Answers could then be submitted to be scored.
• Option 2: Set a class timer (eg. 3 minutes) to have groupmates come to a consensus about the correct answer. At the end of the timer, the teacher uses a quick digital collection method (like Plickers or a single-question generic Form accessed by a QR code) to gather class answers and display the resulting bar graph. At this point, it is important to have a quick class conversation if there is a “2nd” answer that many groups chose. Continue to the next question with the same group or use a random name/group generator to quickly flip the groups. With this method, you might choose to NOT record student scores but instead use this as a formative process.

2. Have students complete the test together in pairs with a single answer sheet. As each group is done, they bring the test to the teacher to have it marked. The teacher circles any incorrect answers and the pair gets a chance (or two?) to change answers. At this point, you might choose to have them “explain” why the new answer is correct/better before you award replacement marks.

to be continued…