Effective Evaluation and Feedback

Grading as an assessment of students' work may not be as not meaningful as we thought it was. It gives validation to the work and also lets student how well they do in the course, so students can keep tract on their progress. It also gives motivation to the students to learn. However, whether or not the students are motivated by the grades, it really depends on how the student take them. A student can be motivated by both "good" and "bad" grades, but some students can be discouraged by bad grades and/or feel slacking off when they have good grades. This means that students' personalities does matter in terms of grading. What and how grades/marks mean to students depends on their personality. I think the meaning underlying means more than a letter grade / mark itself.

Grading reflects how well students' work is in some academic areas such as physics and math but not the other areas such as arts, sports, and social science. The contents of materials in some science courses are quantifiable, for example Algebra equations and questions based on Newton Laws. The answers of these kinds of questions are right-or-wrong. Grade in these academic areas can reflect what students have learned. However, concepts of some materials in other academic areas are abstract and subjective. Art and music classes are good examples. Essay assignments on analysis of a philosophic principle is another example. It is not a easy task for teachers to delivery a fair assessment by only grades. The quality of the students' work is not reflected by just a letter grade/mark. In these areas, feedback and comments of the students' work are more likely to give students a fair assessment by explicitly stating strengths, weakness, and suggestions.

Not only the contents of some academic areas are subjective, but also teachers' perceptions are subjective too. Their perceptions directly affect how they think about the students' assignments. This means that grades given to the students are subjectively influenced by teachers' perceptions, possibly also, by their mood, exhaustion, stress, and other both internal and external factors that influence teachers' subjective views. Therefore, grading are less likely to give a fair assessment of students' work. One may argue, when teachers' judgement is interfered, nor feedback does give a fair assessment to students' assignments. Writing feedback requires teachers a deeper thoughts and analysis of students' work. The cognitive thinking process, I believe, would give a more fair and meaningful evaluation of students' assignments. Hence, feedback does provide a better sense of evaluation than a grade.

Some possible benefits of effective feedback are, first, it gives students better sense of how they do in a class, hence, they can do reflection and adjustment, second, it may improve the communication between teacher and students, and thus, create a good teacher-student relationship, and in the end, students would have an improvement in learning outcomes in terms better achievement in exams and better social emotional developments.