Showcase: Student as Producer: Collaboratively designed marking criteria

How to develop marking criteria and understanding through Talis Elevate and Turnitin with students

Challenge: helping student engage with marking

Activity overview:

This activity uses reading and online marking tools to help students understand marking and develop a rubric for their assessments. 

Production

ABC – Production Type Activity
This activity relates to the ABC activity type of production.
This activity will produce and outcome/output.

Activity in practice:

Academic: Dr Gary Saunders

School: School of Social and Political Science

Dr Gary Saunders worked with students within his school to help them engage with marking criteria through a variety of methods. First they looked at marking criteria with the students, helped them understand the basics of assessment design and how the feedback cycle works. Draft rubrics were created and this was then shared via Talis Elevate as a way for students leave comments and amendments. Further discussion was had and analysed in-depth to finalise the criteria which was then turned into a Turnitin rubric.  

To find out in more detail how this activity was embedded see the link below:

Showcase Blog | Student as Producer: Collaboratively Designed Marking Criteria in Sociology of Education | Digital Education.

Benefits of the activity

  • Empowers students to have direction and greater understanding of how to succeed in their learning.
  • Supports development of assessment literacy.
  • Demystifies assessment outputs.

Instructions & Related Resources

Below you will find some instructions relating to the activity mentioned above to enable you to adapt this activity for your subject area. This is split into three sections for your convenience: preparing the activity, running the activity and related resources. Feel free to let the digital education team know how you have adapted this activity.

Preparing the Activity

  1. Prepare activities related to marking criteria and basic assessment design (looking at appropriate verb levels, clear descriptions, detailed marking scores).
  2. Prepare example sections of essays to use as marking criteria discussions and so that students can learn from real examples. These examples can also be uploaded to Talis elevate to used for highlighting and finding evidence to support marks.
  3. Create a draft rubric in preparation 
  4. Plan time into your sessions over the next few weeks to revisit, discuss and improve assessment literacy

Recommended Tools

Running the Activity

 There are several ways which this activity can be run, the one below is just a suggestion.

Week 1: (Approx. 30mins)

  1. Introduce your class to the assessments, expectations about the output.
  2. Talk them through the rubric and how it works with an open discussion.
  3. Use previous ‘good’ or ‘bad’ examples of the assessment in Talis elevate to get students to attempt with using rubrics, this can lead to an open discussion and develop assessment literacy. If this is a new assessment you may need to make an example.

Week 2: (Approx. 30 mins)

  1. Present them with a draft rubric for the assessment in Talis Elevate .
  2. Get the students to comment and feedback on areas for development. 
  3. Use the online discussion from Talis elevate to start a conversation with students about their feedback and decide on the rubric together. 
  4. Once the rubric design has been discussed and agreed, write up the marking criteria in Turnitin.

Related Resources

Please note that a wide variety of softwares can be used to fulfil this activity. We have placed links to some of these below.

Link | Talis Elevate Guide for Staff | Digital Education Support

Link | Creating Rubrics with Turnitin | Digital Education Support

Blog | Making Feedback part of Learning | Digital Education Support