This school year my district is launching a 1:1 Chromebook initiative. 6th and 9th graders will receive their Chromebooks next semester as part of the rollout. In the meantime, I continue to have access to my Chromebook cart from the Blending Learning pilot I participated in last school year. My goal is to incorporate even more tech use when appropriate; so far, I have increased Chromebook use in my classroom for things like warm up questions, EdPuzzles, and quizzes. My experience with quizzes has been especially interesting.
A couple of weeks ago, I discovered that Google Forms has a quiz option that can auto-grade. I thought this would make my life easier so I gave it a try with my Chemistry 1 (Regular and Honors) Element Quizzes.
The pros: students loved taking the quiz on the Chromebook since they found it easier to type rather than write. You can also release their grade via email. This provides quick feedback.
The cons: Google Forms Quizzes will only auto-correct if the quiz is multiple choice, drop down menu, or check boxes. I had students take a short answer quiz and ended up grading manually just like I would with the usual quarter sheet written quizzes. This experiment of mine did not prove to be any more or less efficient than written quizzes. Hence, it was a bit of a bust on my end.
There are auto-grade add-ons for Google Sheets out there that do work. For example, my Honors Chemistry 1 students took a quick assessment on significant figures last week (identifying # of significant figures and rounding) using Google Forms as the platform. I skipped the quizzes option and auto-graded the data in Sheets using Flubaroo. This streamlined the process. Unfortunately, I still had to go back and manually review students’ results and make grade changes where appropriate since some students put their rounded answers in scientific notation. Flubaroo did not recognize scientific notation as being the same as standard notation responses. It does, however, recognize large numbers with or without commas, ie. 360,000,000 vs 360000000. I did not use Flubaroo for the Element Quizzes because I was concerned that it would auto-correct at a case-sensitive level. This would still require me to manually review each student's’ responses.
Short of turning assessments into multiple choice, do you have suggestions that might streamline the grading process? I’m all about making grading more efficient where possible.