Before: going over work used up class time
Chris Merkert has taught science for 32 years: about 20 at the middle school level and the last 12 or so at East Hampton High School in New York. Chris teaches Earth and Space Science, a bilingual Earth and Space Science section and Astronomy, and is the school's tech facilitator.
For most of those years, the hardest part of grading was turnaround. Going over yesterday's assignment could take a whole 40-minute period, and the next lesson had to wait. Detailed written feedback for every student would have taken around four hours per assignment. And as Chris puts it, a person's energy ebbs and flows, so the last lab in the pile rarely got the attention the first one did.
As a new teacher, you give students an assignment, you wanna go over it the next day in class, and before you know it, the entire forty-minute period is over and you just finished going through the previous night's homework or the previous day's assignment, and that would really erode at teaching.”
Chris sets the rules. GradingPal drafts. Chris decides.
Every assignment starts with Chris's expectations. Sometimes that means adding an answer key, and sometimes GradingPal works from the lab itself. Early on, Chris wrote grading instructions in plain words: be a little softer on this question, accept large numbers within 10 percent.
A class set takes about five minutes to run and about ten more to review. Chris reads the results, then reads them again the way a student will, with Preview as student. When the same mistake shows up across the class, Chris asks whether the rubric is being too harsh and edits it before anything goes back to students.
The students are able to get customized feedback to exactly what they wrote, as if I sat down with them. So I feel like there's twenty-seven of me in the classroom with twenty-seven students.”
Grading Google Slides labs and diagrams
Many of Chris's labs are interactive Google Slides decks of 15 to 20 slides. In one, students build a Hertzsprung–Russell diagram. They drag stars into color columns, place each star on a graph by luminosity and surface temperature, and answer questions in text boxes along the way.
GradingPal reads both: the typed answers and where each star landed. One student scored 18.5 out of 21, with comments on every question about what went well and what to improve. Another had drawn the Sun's path through its later stages in the wrong place, read the feedback, and moved the line.
Student work SHARED
Lab 9.1 Exploring the HR Diagram · Earth and Space Sciences
Submission · page 4 of 8
Surface temperature (K)
TOTAL SCORE
18.5 / 21
88%
20 of 21 answered
Question Part 1 DIAGRAM
1/1
Organize the stars based on their color. Drag each star into the correct color column.
Accuracy of Star Placement and Organization
Score: Complete / Accurate Placement
All star tokens are grouped in the correct color columns, progressing from blue and light blue to yellow, orange and red as temperature decreases.
It will actually read the placement of the stars, the placement of the color bands as well, and evaluate the students on that.”
Feedback during class, not days later
Once an assignment is set up, Chris keeps one classroom computer running GradingPal while walking the room. When new work comes in through Google Classroom, Chris imports it, runs it and shares the feedback back. Students often see feedback two or three times in a single 40-minute period.
That changed how students treat a lab. The first attempt is now a draft. They read the feedback, find the detail they left out, and try again while the lab is still in front of them. Every student gets feedback on what they wrote, at their own pace, instead of one set of comments for the whole class.
They're doing it while it's fresh in their mind. They're not waiting, going to four other classes, doing it again tonight.”
Feedback in the student's own language
Chris is not bilingual. The bilingual Earth and Space Science section has a bilingual teaching assistant in the room, and GradingPal reads students' answers in their own language and writes the feedback in it too.
It does something that I could never do before, which was read what they're writing in their native language and give them good quality feedback in it.”
Seeing what to reteach
For Chris, the real goal is a habit: support every claim with data. New York's newer science exams ask students to defend answers with several sources rather than recall facts, and Chris reminds students that the numbers they need are already on the page. The feedback points out what they left out, every time. Across a year-end exam, five or ten small misses can be the difference between an 86 and a 94.
Class analytics shows where that work is landing. On the HR diagram lab, scores moved toward the green end of the chart, and 18 of 20 students shared one misconception: that temperature alone decides how bright a star is. Chris uses views like this to find the common mistakes worth going back to with the whole class.
Overview
How the class performed on this assignment, at a glance.
CLASS MEAN
76.0%
Median 79.0%
RANGE
55–88
Lowest to highest
SUBMITTED
20/27
74% of class
SCORE DISTRIBUTION
CONSISTENTScores cluster within 33 points. 2 students scored below 60% and 9 scored at or above 80%.
MOST COMMON MISCONCEPTION
Temperature alone determines luminosity
18 of 20
More grading, in less time
Chris expected a time saver, and it is one. A class set of the longer labs used to take three to four hours and now takes 25 to 30 minutes. But Chris now grades more than before, because offering a second round is easy.
It actually has made me grade more, only because I'm grading better. … You want to redo it? Make some corrections, turn it back into me. I'll gladly grade it again.”