Rob Arnold
Dept: Biology
Topic: Managing Student
Papers Electronically
 I use
the track changes feature of Microsoft
Word extensively in grading lab reports
and homework sets in my Biostatistics
course and for student research papers
in Introductory Biology. All of these
assignments are submitted electronically
via the digital dropbox of the
Blackboard web sites. As with anything,
there are pros and cons.
On
the "pro" side:
I must admit that some of my reasons
originate from personal needs, but I
think the students benefit also!
The
more I use a computer, the worse my
handwriting gets and the more of a chore
it is to write detailed comments on
student work. I think better at a
keyboard, writing is relatively
effortless, and hence I tend to write
more carefully constructed, longer, and
more detailed explanations that, I hope,
the students can learn more from.
Often,
I find that several students make the
same mistake or error of interpretation:
I can save much time by writing an
explanation on the first student's work
and then cutting and pasting it to the
work of other students whose work merits
the same comment, where necessary
editing it to make it tailor-made for
individual students. In fact, for each
assignment I keep a growing file of
comments, which has the added benefit of
reminding me of the key points I'm
looking for when I grade an assignment
over a period of hours or days; it helps
with consistency. (If I give the same or
similar assignment next time I teach a
course, I still have these comments!)
I like
the ease with which I can edit my
earlier comments as I grade later
portions of an assignment.
I can
also easily retain copies of all student
work, with all my comments and grades,
for reference or comparison later
without the necessity of photocopying
every graded assignment (which I
wouldn't do).
On
the "con" side:
Track changes doesn't allow me to
write comments "in the
margins" or between lines of text
on student work as I would by hand.
Because of this, every insertion or
comment I make becomes part of the
existing text and hence changes the
formatting of the original with respect
to paragraph structure or page breaks.
This can have unpredictable results
especially if the work contains
carefully placed hard-page breaks! Or,
as happens frequently in my courses, if
the students have placed text or images
inside text boxes but have neglected to
set the Text-Wrap characteristics of
these boxes appropriately -- text boxes
suddenly become superimposed on one
another or on neighboring paragraphs of
text!
There's
no way to set options for deleted text
such that the student's text retains its
original color (black) with the
strikethrough being in the track-changes
color (red). As it is, both the deleted
text and the strikethrough appear in red
(or whatever color has been chosen). I'm
probably being very picky here, but the
end result looks like text I've added
(because it's red) but then changed my
mind and crossed it out.
The
method is probably less suited for
grading long review or argument papers
because you can see only a screenful at
a time.
Set-up
I change the default options of
Track Changes as follows:
- I
set "Mark" to
"none" for Inserted Text,
Changed formatting, and changed
lines: the changes I make in these
areas are clear enough (because
they're in a color different from
the black of the original) without
the additional cluttering of the
work that comes from adding
underlining or vertical lines at
left or right margin or both!)
- I
set "Mark" to
"strikethrough" for
deleted text so that students can
see what it was that I deleted
- I
set the "Color" of all
options to "Red" rather
than "By Author" because
I've found that, with the latter
selected, if I begin grading a
student paper at home on my laptop
and then copy the file to my desktop
to continue grading, my desktop
thinks I'm a second editor and
changes the color of comments I
write using the second computer!
"By Author" is needed only
when two or more people grade the
same piece of work and wish the
student (or one another) to know
which comments were made by which
grader.
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