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iSocrates is an educational software program that allows instructors to quickly and easily create digital evaluation rubrics for virtually any assignment.iSocrates allows instructors to generate criteria pull-down menus featuring their most commonly used feedback comments, and to evaluate student performance from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective. iSocrates can also compute a performance score based on instructor-assigned weights and evaluations, and generate printouts of the filled out rubrics to hand back to students.

This is the project blog for a JISC funded project - Evaluating assessment diaries and GradeMark at the University of Glamorgan. This project is part of the JISC Assessment and Feedback Programme. The programme has three strands. Our project is in Strand B where we will evaluate assessment and feedback related innovations which are already underway in a faculty or institution, and report on lessons for the sector.

Facilitating the provision of detailed, deep and useful feedback is an important design feature of any educational programme. Here we evaluate feedback provided to medical students completing short transferable skills projects. Feedback quantity and depth were evaluated before and after a simple intervention to change the structure of the feedback-provision form from a blank free-text feedback form to a structured proforma that asked a pair of short questions for each of the six domains being assessed. Each pair of questions consisted of asking the marker 'what was done well?' and 'what changes would improve the assignment?' Changing the form was associated with a significant increase in the quantity of the feedback and in the amount and quality of feedback provided to students. We also observed that, for these double-marked projects, the marker designated as 'marker 1' consistently wrote more feedback than the marker designated 'marker 2'.

Useful podcast introduction to a research project on student evaluation being carried out by Betsy Barre of the Rice Centre for Teaching Excellence

""..if we want students to develop critical thinking, judgement and autonomy in assignment production they should be provided with high-level evaluative experiences similar to those of experts. Peer review, students evaluating and commenting on each other's work, is one way to achieve this'"

The growing flood of scholarly literature is exposing the weaknesses of current, citation-based methods of evaluating and filtering articles. A novel and promising approach is to examine the use and citation of articles in a new forum: Web 2.0 services li

"It's been a bad year for student evaluations." by Betsy Barre of RICE CTE

An attempt to get more accurate evaluation

"This screencast captures a research presentation given by the Assistant Director of Rice's Center for Teaching Excellence, Betsy Barre. As Co-Chair of the Committee on Teaching's Subcommittee on Teaching and Course Evaluations, she performed a review of the research literature on student ratings of instruction, and this presentation is a summary of that literature review. Please feel free to jump ahead to the portions of the presentation that are of most interest to you, using the time indices below. If you have further questions, please consult the selected bibliography on the CTE website here: http://cte.rice.edu/studentevaluations"

"As Co-Chair of the Committee on Teaching's Subcommittee on Teaching and Course Evaluations, I performed a review of the research literature on student ratings of instruction"

Over the past several months, the proliferation of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) has been hailed as a potent defense against the rising cost and insular culture of attending a traditional college. The courses, which are generally taught by experts with affiliations to elite universities, are characterized by their unique pedagogy and unlimited enrollment. To date, no course has been accepted for transfer credit at a major on-campus institution; however some administrators and higher-education experts predict their gradual integration into university curriculum. This article examines the MOOC phenomenon, identifying aspects that academic librarians should consider in the coming years, including how these courses interact with scholarly resources and library services. Methods for integrating library services in these courses are evaluated, with recommendations for the best course of action.

 Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme Thomas, L. (2012) Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme . Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme, . (.). pp. 1-100. Abstract Analysis and evaluation on the most effective practices to ensure student retention and success in higher education, in particular for those students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

 Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme  Thomas, L. (2012) Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme . Building student engagement and belonging in higher education at a time of change: final report from the What Works? Student Retention and Success programme, . (.). pp. 1-100. Abstract Analysis and evaluation on the most effective practices to ensure student retention and success in higher education, in particular for those students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

"The primary objective of this project is to investigate how elearning applications can be more tightly integrated with virtual learning environments through the use of the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) specification. A range of popular open source and commercial elearning applications (tool producers) are being used to both identify priorities for integrations with VLEs (or other tool consumers) and also to evaluate the benefits which can be derived from adopting this approach."

PeerWise supports students in the creation, sharing, evaluation and discussion of assessment questions. From Twitter: "@busynessgirl Have you seen Peerwise? http://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/ #socrait (via @polarisdotca)"

Presented during the Activities week of JISC Enhancing e-Learning Conference

"Information literacy-the ability to find, evaluate and use information effectively-is an essential skill set. The authors examine how assignments such as case analyses and research reports help business students master these abilities and provide examples of how analytic rubrics with measurable outcomes are particularly suited to assessing these skills. Also demonstrated is how librarians enhance and support student learning of information literacy by teaching in-depth research skills. Working together, professors and librarians can give students a solid foundation in the information-handling skills they need to be effective and productive in the workplace today."

"MOOCs Forum is the only international publication dedicated exclusively to shaping the future development, design, and deployment of massive, open, online courses (MOOCs). Multidisciplinary in scope, this authoritative Forum evaluates the components and modules that are critical in creating a global education system and sustainable revenue models for MOOCs, as well as enforcing the integrity behind the creation and use of these systems."

"Direct observation of a medical trainees' performance in clinical settings remains challenging. Direct observation serves to ascertain and document the acquisition of core clinical skills. Barriers to direct observation include the lack of effective implementation strategies and difficulties in delivering transparent standards for judging competence at the bedside. Studies have demonstrated that in the absence of transparent standards, the discriminating ability of evaluators judging the exact same clinical performance is poor. The development of criterion-based assessment tools for use by observers during student-patient encounters offers a potential solution to this problem. "

"In Higher Education Focus Groups and Nominal Group Technique are two well-established methods for obtaining student feedback about their learning experience. These methods are regularly used for the enhancement and quality assurance. Based on small-scale research of educational developers' practice in curriculum development, this study presents the use of a combined approach that potentially offers more benefits than the use of Focus Groups alone. It proposes a combined method, 'Nominal Focus Group', which includes the benefits of in-depth discussion of a Focus Group and the prioritising of results of Nominal Group Technique. These benefits include questions for further exploration, initial data analysis and increased ownership of the process by students. In practice, the method gave rise to rich data and actionable outcomes that were used to make informed curriculum enhancements for the programme teams."