Budget cuts and Batman quotes
A week ago Politiken.dk published an article (in Danish) about how Danish students have been putting Batman quotes in their papers without the teacher noticing, and about the general lack of feedback given to students in the pedagogical program at University College Copenhagen (UCC).
The article tells the story about Maria Bentsen who was writing an assignment about ethical dilemmas when working with troubled youth with her student group. They were unsure if the teacher would actually read their assignment, so they decided to include a paragraph with Batman quotes.
Their teacher seemed to not notice anything — even though the teacher said she had read the assignment.
Unfortunately not an isolated case
According to various sources in the article, this is not an isolated case. Students have been known to hand in baking recipes and blank assignments, while still getting a passing grade from the teacher.
Peter Møller Pedersen is an educational leader in the pedagogical program at VIA University College. He states that this is obviously not acceptable, and that this is only happening due to under financing of the programme.
This is not just a problem at UCC
Giving feedback and assessing hand-ins from students is an extremely costly affair, and this problem is not specific to the university colleges in Denmark.
As a fellow teacher I understand the pressure of giving feedback to our students. I see this problem as an injustice to the teachers and the students, students are missing out on valuable feedback to improve their education and teachers are being made into the bad guys for working within the budget and time constraints they are given. A normal consequence is that teachers will decide to remove the assignments from their courses to save time on evaluation.
In my own course Computational Tools for Big Data at The Technical University of Denmark, hiring teaching assistants for grading the assignments that students hand in costs around $7,700 USD / semester — for ONE course.
Last year my course grew from 20 students to more than 130 students from one semester to the next. This meant that the task of evaluating and giving feedback to students became overwhelming. As an attempt to solve this problem I started the work on Peergrade.io.
Let students partake in the in the feedback process
Peer grading and peer feedback is the practice of letting students become part of the evaluation and feedback process. It works by letting students read the work of other students, and by letting them evaluate and give feedback to each other.
Peergrade.io is a tool for facilitating and moderating this process in an easy and reliable way. Teachers can set up evaluation criteria that students will use to evaluate. Students are able to mark feedback they disagree with for the teacher to moderate — ensuring that the teachers time is focused on handling the challenging cases. When you receive feedback as a student, you are also asked to provide an evaluation of the quality of the received feedback.
“The night is darkest just before the dawn. And I promise you, the dawn is coming.” — Harvey Dent (The Dark Knight)
Using a combination of advanced algorithms and the evaluations of feedback quality, each student receives a score indicating the quality of what they handed in and the quality of the feedback they provided. The teacher can access this in various dashboards and can use it as a guide when giving final grades to students.
But can you really trust students?
An obvious question that many ask is whether students are actually able to give useful feedback and trustworthy evaluations of other students. A recent study from University of Pittsburgh (among other previous studies) shows that this is in fact the case. By having multiple students evaluating the same hand-in, the results are at least as trustworthy as teacher evaluations.
The future for feedback in education
Starting after summer, UCC will be rolling out Peergrade for some of their courses. This is a way to make sure that students receive better and more timely feedback — while simultaneously reducing the associated costs.
Peergrade is now in use at most universities in Denmark (DTU, AAU, AU, CBS, ITU, KU, SDU) and various high schools and university colleges around Denmark. After the summer, a range of more institutions will join, both from Denmark and internationally!
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