Today, I’m focusing on discussion boards, part II. In my last episode, I covered how to develop discussion board questions, how to use video discussions and different platforms to use. Today, I’ll be focusing on how to evaluate and grade responses, including using rubrics. Let’s jump in!
EVALUATING DISCUSSION BOARD RESPONSES
In the last episode, I talked a lot about developing your discussion board questions, making sure they are open-ended to encourage multiple viewpoints and generate additional jumping off points. When developing your discussion board questions, you will also want to consider how you will evaluate responses. I found this rubric for assessing critical and integrative thinking in online discussions by Washington State University in a study on using best practices in online discussions and liked it because it’s more than the standard, reply to two other people and make sure your response has 150 words or something similar that we typically see. It goes in a different direction than tying the discussion to just a grade. I like that it wants us as educators to take into consideration:
- “Did the student consider the context of the topic and relate it to something similar or integrate other perspectives?”
- “Did the student provide supporting data or details of their statements?”
- “Did they develop their own position?”
Now, not every student is going to be ready for these standards, but I want to see us help students onto this path and help them develop their own voice and opinions and learn how to share it with others and that’s where you knowing your students and creating a structure that works in your class is beneficial to building skills for discussions.
RESPONDING TO STUDENTS AND GIVING FEEDBACK
As students add their responses, I would encourage you to become part of the discussion too and add your comments, thoughts and opinions too. Continue to ask students questions about the topic and have them provide clarifications to answers by giving feedback to their responses. Being open and positive with students will create an environment where students will want to participate. If a certain topic seems to not go anywhere, prompt students with guiding questions to open another route for discussion, if needed.
If using Flipgrid, you can respond to students by recording your own response and keep the conversation flowing or again ask clarifying questions. I’ll talk about grading in just a moment.
USING RUBRICS AND GRADING
I realize that the earlier rubric I featured may feel like a bit of a left field option, so I also found a couple of other rubrics that are more conventional. The first one shared in the episode notes gives information on how many times to post during the week and what criteria falls under certain grades. It also includes what an “A” response should look like. The other rubrics included are similar and there are also some for video discussions too.
Flipgrid being the most popular video discussion platform has its own basic rubric that focuses on student verbalization and clarity of expressed ideas or you can customize your own. If you choose to add your own, within the topic choose “Custom Feedback“. Select the blue “Add Criteria” button and create a criteria title and description. Then choose a minimum score and maximum score. Select the blue “Create” button to add the criteria. Once all of the custom criteria has been added, select the blue “Update Topic” button.
I really like Flipgrid’s newest update and how you can focus on an individual student to provide a public comment under the “Details” tab and then provide private feedback and grading under the “Feedback” tab by recording a private message to the student or typing one and then giving a grade based on the rubric. Then when you’re ready, click on the picture of the next student.
Since we’re on the topic of rubrics, check to see if your LMS allows you to add rubrics to your discussion boards. I say this, because my LMS Canvas can do this and I had no idea!
When you set up your discussion board, make sure you have it set to be a graded discussion and set up your discussion as normal and click “Save and Publish” or “Save”. Then you’ll see the published view of your discussion board. Now, don’t leave this page, because this is how we’ll set up the rubric. Just to the right of the “Edit” button, is the 3 dots. Click this and select “Add Rubric”. You can either find a rubric you’ve previously used or create a new one. To use a previous rubric, select “Find a Rubric”, find the course where the rubric is located and then click on the rubric you want to use, and click on “Use This Rubric”.
Or create a new one. Add a title and the criterion you will be grading on, plus the point values. Then underneath the criterion, you will have several options to look at as far as how you want the rubric to work with the discussion board:
You can write free-form comments instead of using a ratings scale, which allows you to write and leave comments in Speedgrader related to the specific criterion. The scale ratings will disappear and you will have to assign the criterion values by typing them in manually. (show image of this). You can also save comments as a sort of “comment bank” to reuse with other students.
You can also choose to remove points from the rubric, by selecting the “Remove points from rubric” checkbox. If this option is selected, no points will be associated with the rubric, but students can still be rated using the rubric criterion.
My district doesn’t have outcomes enabled, so I’ll skip this one, but make sure to check the box for “Use this rubric for assignment grading” to use with Speedgrader.
Finally, the last option is to “Remove points from rubric”, which means if this option is selected, no points are associated with the rubric, but students can still be rated using the rubric criterion, but the total score will not be shown at the bottom of the rubric. This option is only available if the rubric is not used for grading and only applies to students when they view rubrics from the Grades page.
Once you have selected the options you want, select “Create Rubric”. Canvas will then compare the rubric score and assignment points. If the number of points in the rubric is different from the number of points in the assignment, Canvas will generate a warning message notifying that the point values are not equal. To update the number of points in the assignment, click the “Change” button.
When you’re ready to grade in Speedgrader, go to the discussion board, click the 3 dots and select “Speedgrader”. Once in Speedgrader, select the student, then underneath where the grade goes, click on “View Rubric”. Then click the rating you want to give students in each criterion. You can also add a comment for each rubric criterion by clicking the “Comment” icon under the points field and then click “Save”. The rubric points will be automatically populated in the grade field.
All of the resources mentioned in today’s episode will be available in the episode notes on Wakelet.
How do you grade student discussion boards? Do you use a rubric? Let us know in the comments below!
Ms Priester EDU 