Verify Students are Reading Teacher Commentary

[DanHahn]

Greetings everyone! In studying student interactions with instructor feedback in the LMS, I found a peer reviewed article called “Responding to Student Writing Online: Tracking Student Interactions with Instructor Feedback in a Learning Management System” ​which appeared in the journal Assessing Writing, vol. 31, Jan. 2017, pp. 39–52.

This study focuses on student behaviors with reading instructor commentary on essays returned to students in the Learning Management System. This study looks at the Sakai LMS; however, the findings are relevant regardless of platform. Specifically, not making the grade visible makes students 35 percent more likely to review instructor feedback. Also, making the grade visible separately from the assignment commentary increases the likelihood that students will disregard feedback altogether.

 

The problem is present in Canvas and students need to perform additional clicks to see commentary on Assignments. Students interested in just seeing the grades can see that information, and the Canvas interface is not doing anything to support the longstanding academic tradition of leveraging instructor commentary for instructional purposes. Below are two screenshots, the top one is of the Assignment area after a student gets a grade and feedback, the bottom one is of the Gradebook. Both cases students need to perform additional clicks to get to the instructor feedback.

The authors of the study articulate it best: “[s]eparating grading from feedback is a significant change to the response process, one that exacerbates certain concerns and fears that writing instructors have about how students weigh the importance of grades versus feedback” and “[w]here instructors wish students would give more attention to feedback, the LMS interface seems to be nudging them in the opposite direction”

This has been a problem in composition pedagogy long before LMSs were on the scene, and the issue is that students care more about the score than the learning. However, I argue that this is a problem that good interface design can address. Perhaps, similarly to the Discussion Board "Post First" feature, there should be an option in Canvas Assignments to "Read Feedback First"? I am no expert on interface design, so I think this is an area that would benefit from some attention from developers and product managers at Instructure.  Even though academics have identified this problem in the literature, there hasn't been any improvements to LMS interface.

Overall, it seems there needs to be a better integration between the Gradebook and Assignment feedback, and I'm not seeing this discussion anywhere else in the Canvas Community.

Thanks!

[KristiHeckman]

This is very powerful information. I am trying to think of another resource that we could use that students would have to go through before seeing their grades. Sort of like EdPuzzle does. I am new to Canvas. Is there an option to not show students their grades? One of my thoughts was being able to enter something other than their grade, maybe marking it as incomplete, until they respond to the feedback on the assignment. It could be a form that they had to answer questions that show they have read it and the form would be a quick way to see who has done so. I'm not sure how much more work that would intel for the teacher, but it would force a student to read the feedback. At least it is the start of summer and I can find time to troubleshoot this for my students next year.

[DanHahn]

Thanks for your feedback! I did discover that whoever is grading can actually submit comments and feedback and just not enter a score. This would be useful in scenarios where teachers really want students to focus on feedback, so a Teacher can leave a comment such as "Correct such-and-such and resubmit by... to get a score..." It is possible to hide columns in the Grade Book, but this also hides the Teacher's comments. Again, the problem seems to be the separation between the Assignment's grading/commenting tools and the scoring/Grade Book features.

[scunningham1]

A downfall of not giving a score, only comments is that students think their work is still be graded and they won't notice any comments. I put a 0 in as a score with the comments to fix something for a higher grade. This gets their attention that the work is graded and there are comments to read. I also go over this at the beginning of the school year and remind them of this frequently through the class.

[elisat]

This is a great workaround if you expect students to re-submit and you are planning on giving them a score based on the resubmission.

However, the instructor shouldn't have to manually return to add the score if they don't expect students to re-submit. There should be an option to trigger the release of a score after students see the feedback.

[KathleenRalf]

This has been a feature our teachers have asked for.  Read feedback first, then I will show you the grade.  But you can't read the feedback until the grade is released.