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poof
Joined: 23 May 2005
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 Posted: Mon May 29, 2006 9:57 pm Post subject: |
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| I agree with the above that the presenters ability to ask and receive questions from the audience is also an integral part of a presentation. Perhaps you need to factor this in to your evaluation sheet. |
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Hotpants
Joined: 27 Jan 2006
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| Posted: Mon May 29, 2006 10:01 pm Post subject: |
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I agree with above. Many students give presentations which are just recited by heart with them having no real understanding of what they were actually talking about - man, have I heard some weird stuff being presented by students...Turned out their parents often wrote the script.
By having unexpected questions thrown in, you can assess whether the presenter can think independently and really understands the ideas behind the words.
We need to encourage Korean students to be greater independent thinkers and generate a more lively debate of discussion topics as in a Western classroom. You essentially have the power to change their generation and thankfully it sounds as if your school are receptive to you implementing new assessment strategies. |
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Hotpants
Joined: 27 Jan 2006
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| Posted: Mon May 29, 2006 10:03 pm Post subject: |
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| Alas,,,,,where's my avatar????? |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Mon May 29, 2006 10:30 pm Post subject: |
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| Unreal wrote: |
Wow, you guys have some great ideas. I really liked Wolan's first post and the idea of making it perfectly clear what each score means. After talking to my supervisor I came up with a new evaluation sheet. I wanted to focus more on English speaking and ideas than performance. Here's my new evaluation sheet, which I think covers everything I'm looking for:
Pronunciation (4 points)
Excellent: All words are spoken well and are easy to understand
Good: Some words not correct but can be understood by context.
Fair: Some words are difficult/impossible to understand.
Inadequate: Whole sentences are difficult to understand.
Fluency (3)
Good: Student speaks clearly and fluently without hesitation.
Fair: Student�s sentences are a little choppy, a bit unclear or too fast.
Inadequate: Student takes long pauses to think or read.
Vocabulary Level and Variety/Wrong usage (3)
Good: Proper level of vocabulary is used to communicate.
Fair: Some words are inappropriate or generally simple.
Inadequate: Too simple vocabulary or misused used words hinder meaning.
Grammar/Sentence Structure (2) (tense, number, articles, appropriate sentence length)
Good: Proper grammar is maintained throughout presentation.
Fair: Some grammatical errors but meaning is still fairly clear.
Inadequate: Grammatical errors hinder meaning of some sentences.
Contents (2) (Arguments are focused and clear and there is good evidence for them)
Good: Clear arguments with good examples
Fair: Argument is not quite clear. Some examples are not adequate.
Inadequate: Argument is hard to understand and lacking good examples.
Appropriate, Challenging and Interesting Topic (2) (Is it thought provoking and relevant?)
Good: The topic is fresh and creative or addresses the topic in a critical way
Fair: Addresses an assigned issue but lacks creativity or critical thinking.
Inadequate: Topic is not one of the ones assigned or fails to hold interest.
Attitude, Gestures, Eye Contact (2)
Good: Maintains a smile and good eye contact. Uses appropriate gestures and movement.
Fair: Keeps a smile and eye contact occasionally. Gestures are few and movement is minimal or inappropriate.
Inadequate: Reading, very little eye contact. Very few gestures/movement.
Audience Response (2)
Good: The audience is very interested in the topic and concentrates on the speaker. Audience wants to be involved in the presentation.
Fair: The audience is paying attention but shows no strong response.
Inadequate: The audience appears to be uninterested. |
Hi Unreal,
I like this. You've put some good stuff together here in terms of defining your bands in each catoegory. Combined with your notes, students will get some good feedback out of this that will help them improve.
I do still think 8 categories is too many. It's just too hard to think about that many things at one time. You might think about squeezing this down to 4 permanent categories and a fifth one that rotates for different presentations the students do.
For me, I might collapse fluency and pronunciation into a single category. I might also collapse Content and Appropriate, Challenging and Interesting Topic as well.
I would also probably cut out Audience Response. I'm not sure we can hold students responsible for this, especially when the audience isn't there voluntarily. Besides, if you give the audience members jobs to do that require their involvement, the category becomes moot 
Good luck with your new rubric. Let us know how it turns out. |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Mon May 29, 2006 10:34 pm Post subject: |
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| Double post |
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Lemonade
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Location: South Korea
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| Posted: Tue May 30, 2006 9:08 pm Post subject: |
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Try grading 80 presentations a day for the whole day with little or no break between speakers. Some of us just don't have time to write all those notes. Futhermore, after about three hours of writing, your fingers, hand, wrist, elbow, arm, shoulder, back, neck and head all begin to ache and to the point that you physically can't write or think anymore. Don't feel bad if you can't remember all those presentations.... no one could.
OP, remember you don't have to justify your grades. I know what you are going through. Your students are challenging you.
This semester I caught a number of students plagiarizing word for word off the internet etc. and when they asked why they got an "F-uh" I uh I threatened to show them a copy of where they found the information and show them word for word two pages of.... and their response was "yes." They knew.  I've caught enough students cheating that they don't bother to challenge me anymore about grades. |
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Hanson
Joined: 20 Oct 2004
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| Posted: Tue May 30, 2006 11:51 pm Post subject: |
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| Lemonade wrote: |
Try grading 80 presentations a day for the whole day with little or no break between speakers. Some of us just don't have time to write all those notes. Futhermore, after about three hours of writing, your fingers, hand, wrist, elbow, arm, shoulder, back, neck and head all begin to ache and to the point that you physically can't write or think anymore. Don't feel bad if you can't remember all those presentations.... no one could.
OP, remember you don't have to justify your grades. I know what you are going through. Your students are challenging you.
This semester I caught a number of students plagiarizing word for word off the internet etc. and when they asked why they got an "F-uh" I uh I threatened to show them a copy of where they found the information and show them word for word two pages of.... and their response was "yes." They knew. I've caught enough students cheating that they don't bother to challenge me anymore about grades. |
Man oh man! How can I put this PC-like?
First of all, how is this helpful to the OP, or anyone else viewing this thread for useful info about evaluating presentations?
Secondly, there is just something negative about your posts. You seem angry.
Third, how is what you've explained above helpful to your students.
About the plagiarising, you do realise that many Korean students don't even know that plagiarising is frowned upon, right? How about pointing out to them that it's a form of cheating and that it's unacceptable. Perhaps give them a chance to re-write and take off a few points. Or better yet, address the issue in class before they do their assignments (or maybe you do this already).
As for the 80 class presentations in a short time, I'm not sure if you have the ability to change the times for the presentations and spread them out over a longer period of time, but if you don't, a set of guidelines for the criteria would go a long way, instead of a random score where students don't know what they did wrong.
Lemonade, you obviously are an intelligent individual. I hope you can see this as a constructive post (like those of woland, PRagic, Kyrei, vdowd, and others on this thread). |
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guangho
Joined: 19 Jan 2005
Location: a spot full of deception, stupidity, and public micturation and thus unfit for longterm residency
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| Posted: Wed May 31, 2006 12:06 am Post subject: |
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It depends on the character of each class. Right now I am doing grades for a remedial class and handing out A's like candy for those who did the work and showed some effort. In one of my better classes, some of these students would barely get C's but perspective matters.
Ask yourself:
Did the student put in the time and effort to get something out of the presentation? Did s/he do her best? I can tell when a student is reciting a script and when they are doing their own work. I can also tell when they are making an effort and when they just threw some shit together the night before. |
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Lemonade
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Location: South Korea
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| Posted: Wed May 31, 2006 1:10 am Post subject: |
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| Hanson wrote: |
About the plagiarising, you do realise that many Korean students don't even know that plagiarising is frowned upon, right? How about pointing out to them that it's a form of cheating and that it's unacceptable. Perhaps give them a chance to re-write and take off a few points. Or better yet, address the issue in class before they do their assignments (or maybe you do this already).
As for the 80 class presentations in a short time, I'm not sure if you have the ability to change the times for the presentations and spread them out over a longer period of time, but if you don't, a set of guidelines for the criteria would go a long way, instead of a random score where students don't know what they did wrong.
Lemonade, you obviously are an intelligent individual. I hope you can see this as a constructive post (like those of woland, PRagic, Kyrei, vdowd, and others on this thread). |
When I've spent week after week, month after month, paper after paper etc. drilling it into these students' heads that they have to use quotes and cite their sources and then then come to me with a paper that is completely plagiarized.... they KNOW better. Yeah, it makes me angry. It makes me angry that Koreans are teaching Koreans that cheating, plagairizing and lying are alright so there's little or no punishment. It makes me even more angry that foreign teachers are out there trying to say this is "Korean culture" and they simply let it all slide. Yes, it makes me angry when people aren't taught right from wrong. It makes me sick to my stomach to hear a student admit to all this wrongdoing without an ounce of shame and ask if they can make up for it. My answer is always flat out "No, because you knew better." Their answer is always, "yes." There's no more challenge after that and the student is far more attentive in class.
When you work for a university in Korea it's common for the departments to set times for mid-term and final exams. As professors, we don't have much say so over the dates or times for those exams.
Not that it's really any of you business, I have two solid pages of criteria set up for grading. I'm not looking for advice from you or anyone concerning how I grade. The OP is asking for advice.
Hanson, if you think teaching large classes full of immature Korean university students (who hate English and foreigners) is such a walk in the park, let me just tell you, I wouldn't wish some of my classes on my worst enemy. |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Wed May 31, 2006 2:55 am Post subject: |
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| Lemonade wrote: |
| OP, remember you don't have to justify your grades. I know what you are going through. Your students are challenging you. |
But we do have to justify our grades. Students challenge grades because they don't see them as justified. If we justify our grades by using criteria that are clear and are shared in advance with students, we can reduce the amount of challenges that occur. And when challenges do occur, we can insist that students specify their complaints in terms of the criteria. When a challenge is framed in terms of the criteria, then we can talk about it and I can explain my position (supported by notes I took in observing the presentation), while they can put forward their view. Generally, I find that this approach allows a positive solution to the process, even if I don't give an inch. The students come away knowing why I gave them the grade I did, and also that I will listen to them about how they see the process. Often, I learn things about how they are learning from talking to them about this.
I'd like to note here, too, that students challenge grades because the educational system that they have come up in has been performance- oriented (focused on grades and competition with other students) rather then mastery-oriented (focused on learning). We can do little to change that, but making our classes mastery-oriented and working with students to help them recognize their own learning (and everything I've been talking about here is about this) will over time bring some of our students to another way of seeing what they are doing in school. We need to play up the informational aspects of our assessments and play down the rating aspects of them to do this.
| Lemonade wrote: |
| This semester I caught a number of students plagiarizing word for word off the internet etc. and when they asked why they got an "F-uh" I uh I threatened to show them a copy of where they found the information and show them word for word two pages of.... and their response was "yes." They knew. I've caught enough students cheating that they don't bother to challenge me anymore about grades. |
Plagiarism is a perennial problem, but I don't think we will solve it by catching it at the end of each assignment or at the end of the term. That leads to the adversarial process you describe of students trying to sneak it past us and us playing policeman, trying to catch them. It also comes out of the performace-orientation I mentioned above.
I think there are a bunch of things we can do about this. First, we need to design assignments that limit the possibilities for plagiarism. A friend of mine who used to direct one of the writing programs at Berkeley once said, "If an assignment can be downloaded from the internet, maybe it should be." Requiring students to personalize their assignments, to consolidate and synthesize information, and reflect their own views, rather than merely report, can go a long way to doing this.
But still, some plagiarism is going to happen. But for me, it isn't plagiarism unless it's still there in the final draft. Until then, it's an opportunity for learning. Doing fewer assignments but doing them deeper with multiple drafts can let us show students that we recognize when they plagiarize and more importantly, that we prefer it when we hear their own voices in the writing. It can also give us a chance to work with them on their weak language, which is often why they plagiarize. This becomes an opportunity to reinforce the mastery orientation that we want to promote by getting the students to see that working through the process on their own actually helps them learn. This is going to take time for a lot of reasons. We need to give up the belief that students learn what we teach them and then we can move on to other things. We need to teach about plagiarism continuously. This is another reason why doing less in term of total content, but doing it deeper is more effective. I realize that many teachers face packed syllabuses or other requirements that work against this, but where we can, this is a better approach, I think. Where we can't do this, we should argue for it.
| Lemonade wrote: |
| Try grading 80 presentations a day for the whole day with little or no break between speakers. Some of us just don't have time to write all those notes. Futhermore, after about three hours of writing, your fingers, hand, wrist, elbow, arm, shoulder, back, neck and head all begin to ache and to the point that you physically can't write or think anymore. Don't feel bad if you can't remember all those presentations.... no one could. |
In my days at university here, ten years ago, I would often have 150 presentations (5 classes x 30 students) over finals week, plus essays from my writing classes (1 or 2 classes, again 30 students). It was a busy time and I can appreciate that it is stressful for the teacher. I always felt that way. One of the things I learned was how much prior organization could, including having grading criteria, could help me reduce my burden. I will admit here that I learned this the hard way and my comments here come out of learning that I did to deal with these problems. But with good criteria on a simple grade sheet which has room for me to take brief notes related to the criteria, I can remember all the presentations. |
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Lemonade
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Location: South Korea
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| Posted: Wed May 31, 2006 3:16 am Post subject: |
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| Woland wrote: |
| I can remember all the presentations. |
Sorry I'm not as perfect as you. |
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Hanson
Joined: 20 Oct 2004
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| Posted: Wed May 31, 2006 4:38 am Post subject: |
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| Lemonade wrote: |
| Woland wrote: |
| I can remember all the presentations. |
Sorry I'm not as perfect as you. |
See? This is what I'm talking about. Woland goes out of his way to write a very helpful post, which probably took him a while, and his reward for doing so is "Sorry I'm not as perfect as you"?
BTW, woland, keep 'em coming for the rest of us who find your posts very enlightning! I'd love to pick your brain! |
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Woland
Joined: 10 May 2006
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Wed May 31, 2006 4:40 am Post subject: |
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| Lemonade wrote: |
| Woland wrote: |
| I can remember all the presentations. |
Sorry I'm not as perfect as you. |
Lemonade, You've quoted me selectively there. What I really said is:
| Woland wrote: |
| But with good criteria on a simple grade sheet which has room for me to take brief notes related to the criteria, I can remember all the presentations. |
I wouldn't claim perfection at all. In fact, it's because I can't remember all those presentations on my own that I argue for using a simple, limited set of grading criteria, put on a page that I can take notes on. Then, when students come for feedback or to challenge their grade, I can say, "Wait a minute, let me get my notes." With those, I can recall why I gave the grades I did and talk to students about that.
This is still subjective. My notes call up particular things about the students' performances, but not a video clip of the performances themselves. But the notes are helpful because they are related to the criteria that I was focusing on and that the students are graded on.
It's not perfect, but it reduces the amount of variation in the process. And I'm not perfect, but I hope I'll keep learning and getting better at what I do, as I'm sure you do. |
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Lemonade
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Location: South Korea
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| Posted: Wed May 31, 2006 6:01 pm Post subject: |
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First you say this:
| Woland wrote: |
| I can remember all the presentations. |
And then you go on to say this:
| Quote: |
| I wouldn't claim perfection at all. In fact, it's because I can't remember all those presentations . |
So which is it? |
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Scott in Incheon
Joined: 30 Aug 2004
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| Posted: Wed May 31, 2006 7:19 pm Post subject: |
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What Woland wrote....
| Quote: |
| But with good criteria on a simple grade sheet which has room for me to take brief notes related to the criteria, I can remember all the presentations. |
| Quote: |
| In fact, it's because I can't remember all those presentations on my own that I argue for using a simple, limited set of grading criteria, put on a page that I can take notes on. |
what Lemonade quoted
| Quote: |
First you say this:
Woland wrote:
| Quote: |
| I can remember all the presentations. |
And then you go on to say this:
Quote:
| Quote: |
| I wouldn't claim perfection at all. In fact, it's because I can't remember all those presentations |
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You do see where you sent wrong, don't you Lemonade.... |
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