Adaptive Release of Grades

Adaptive Release of Grades

by Steve van Ommen -
Number of replies: 4

Very often when we mark their work, many students will go straight to the grade on their assignment and ignore or at least fail to process any written feedback. As markers we put a lot of time into this task and nothing irks us more than seeing this effort wasted.

To encourage students to engage with our feedback, I'm sure many of us  would love to see some kind of adaptive release of grades. The idea is this: to have their grade automatically released, students would first be required to use our written feedback to write a paragraph or so on how they intend to use the feedback to improve their performance. 

There is an excellent article about this here but currently no such feature in Moodle as far as I can see. I know there are 'conditional activities' for quizzes but it would be great to see this kind of thing applied to grades.

In reply to Steve van Ommen

Re: Adaptive Release of Grades

by Tim Hunt -
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Doesn't this rather miss the point.

We want students to read the feedback because they find it a helpful way to learn, not because we have made reading the feedback a roadblock on the way to getting their grades.

I think the Open University is (and OU tutors are) very good at that. I think the solution comes in two parts:

1. Make sure that the feedback you give actually tells the students things that they can apply to do a better job in their next assignment.

2. Keep stressing the students that the feedback cycle is an important part of the learning process and is an important study skill.

To really drive home 2. a number of OU courses do something like this: In the second assignment in the course, there will be a question

"Look back at your tutor's comments from TMA01.

"a) Choose one of the questions there, and rewrite your answer taking account of the feedback you received. Submit your revised answer here. [5 marks]

"b) Write a paragraph explaining how you changed your answer in response to your tutor's feedback. [5 marks]"

Normally courses will only do this once, because space in assignments is a limited commodity. I suppose the hope is that once you have forced students to do it once, they will get the idea, and in future use the feedback from the previous assignments to do better on future assignments themselves.

In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Adaptive Release of Grades

by Steve van Ommen -

Thanks for your input - especially points (a) and (b). I neglected to mention that I'm working witt high school students! Most students do read and value feedback for the very reasons you mentioned, but there are a number who will take the path of minimum resistance. For them an incentive to at least read the comments is necessary. I trust they will find the comments of value when they do. I'm toying with the idea of having students submit an online learning diary each term  - where they plan and reflect on their assessments and the feedback they received. 

In reply to Steve van Ommen

Re: Adaptive Release of Grades

by Mark Sexton -

I agree adaptive release of grades would be a useful function. This is currently available within Blackboard with the assignment handler module allowing adaptive release of grades to students as soon as they have read and responded to their feedback. To have this functionality within Moodle would be very useful.

This study at Sheffield Hallam University found that using adaptive release of grades did improve students engagement with feedback.

http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/EvidenceNet/TFA_report_final.pdf

In reply to Mark Sexton

Re: Adaptive Release of Grades

by mary watkins -

We're using Moodle 2.4.4 but due to upgrade to 2.5 soon. Is the adaptive release an option on this version as having read the Sheffield Hallam report I'd like to explore the options of adaptive release.