I am not in the Wizard of Oz camp of leading students on a wild goose chase to the Emerald City only to tell them that they had their ruby slippers all along. I am much more into the evidencebased practice of teaching students explicitly about how to improve. Along the way, however, students need to become independent, so I also explicitly teach them how to selfmonitor, apply metacognitive skills to their work, and set goals.
I have listed the technology tools below in order of least to most independence; you can either use them in sequence as an instructional tool or as a means of differentiation.
Choosing Goals
Teachers can use Google Forms in several ways to give students immediate feedback on their work. The amount of feedback you provide can vary, and options include simply reloading the page for a second attempt after students input incorrect answers, providing students with resources tailored to their incorrect answers (e.g., including a link to a relevant educational video or other text), and providing them with the correct answer after a specified number of attempts.
In June, Google Forms introduced a quiz feature that allows test creators to select the number of "points" per question and select correct answers, which reduces repetitive grading. Similar to the Flubaroo addon (which also allows teachers to mark quizzes immediately), Google Form's quiz feature allows teachers to tack on explanations and review materials to accompany correct answers. With explicit labeling, this capability can help students set goals: they can look at questions they got wrong and use commonalities (for example, questions that involve order of operations) to set a goal. Be sure to check off the box that allows students to see the questions they missed or answered incorrectly, after a quiz. You can also choose to allow students to access the correct responses.
SelfGrading
When students understand the objectives of an assignment or task clearly, they learn more. Self-grading can help students clarify objectives.
Selfgrading should be taught explicitly to be most effective, but even without instruction, it is a powerful pedagogical tool, more so than grading by teachers or peers. "Students at all levels appear to benefit from selfgrading, with significant gains at the lower and middle levels," write researchers Sadler and Good (2006). Judging the correctness of answers is an additional opportunity for students to deepen their understanding about a topic."
Technology can also support student selfgrading and self-regulation, simply by offering correct answers or criteria for success consistently and readily perhaps via a class blog or Google Classroom (Nicol & MacfarlaneDick, 2005). Technology also makes it easier for teachers to provide annotated exemplary models on any written assignment, particularly when using Kaizena to record audio comments on specific parts of an assignment on Google Docs. Technology, such as QuickTime, Screencastify, or SnagIt, can also demonstrate teacher think-alouds of the grading process by taking a screencast of a teacher marking a sample assignment. These tools help students understand how to identify quality feedback, which is an essential step in this process (Sadler, 2013). Students can then use these same tools to grade their work and provide themselves with feedback, which can transform into their goals. Lastly, students can also use rubrics (described below) to assess their work.
Creating Assessments
Students receive numerous benefits from creating assessments, either for themselves or for the class as a whole. Student questions provide valuable information to help teachers evaluate student learning, too. Can students identify the most important pieces of information? Can they write questions that reflect their knowledge? Can they write tricky questions because they can conceive plausiblebutincorrect responses? A "yes" answer to each of these demonstrates genuine understanding.
Google Forms are highly intuitive, and even my lower elementary students have generated quiz items for themselves or each other, so that is one excellent choice to help students learn to create diverse question types (from scales to multiple choice and from paragraph texts to checkboxes). I encourage both you and your students to use analytic rubrics over holistic rubrics because they are more reliable, recognize that students develop at different paces, and allow for "weighted criteria" (where certain elements are worth more "points"). I recently asked a student to generate her own rubric to grade her writing, and she purposely weighted the inclusion of background information for each quotation more heavily than a concluding sentence, because the quotation setup was relatively more difficult for her. This showed an apt selfawareness, and she will now selfmonitor the sentences between her quotations more frequently and independently.
OrangeSlice is one add-on for rubric creation that integrates seamlessly with Google Docs and Google Classroom. Students can use the student rubric option for selfgrading, but if you allow students to create rubrics with the teacher option, these will be even more differentiated and relevant. Learn more by watching educational videos about OrangeSlice from its creator, Matt Buchanan.
Take Away
As a final note, I should recognize that all of these grading options focus on students' metacognition, selfawareness, and selfmonitoring—not grades. Despite the repeated use the words "assessment," "grading," and "points," teachers can use all of these practices independently of actual graded assignments, and you will reap the same benefits (Schinske & Tanner, 2014).