How can I setup my Talon Gradebook to share feedback with students?
Grading Context
Students might interpret grades in many ways. Feedback, according to Stone and Heen (2014), is given and received as evaluative, as coaching, or as appreciation, but the giving and receiving do not always align. Grades, I suspect, will mostly feel evaluative to our students. Look for ways grades can encourage more practice, become part of a meaningful conversation, and guide students toward improving their abilities, curiosity, and depth of knowledge.
Keeping a grade book in Talon helps students track their performance and access feedback in a centralized location. A complete (yet adjustable) list of graded items or essential learning tasks in the grades tool organizes milestones and communicates there is a structure to their learning. It lays out the expectations of the course. Having a current overall score makes it easy to push a midterm or final grade from Talon to the student's official record. And an up-to-date grade book is a life raft for those emergency situations where you may need to step into another instructor's course.
Basic Talon Gradebook Setup
Creating your gradebook categories and items before the course begins sets up an outline of the activities and assessments the student will be expected to complete. An orderly group of grade categories and items communicates intentions have been set, and while you are certainly free to adjust these intentions later, having them appear on day one for students is the goal.
Points vs Weighted vs Formula
Points is the simplest (and default) option - Talon will add up the earned points and divide by the total possible. Weighted categories allows you to assign weights to the categories so that exams might be 50% of the calculated score while quizzes and discussions are each set to 25%. It's slightly more math for students to understand since a high point assignment might be worth very little when the weight is small. Formula is usually not necessary, but has been useful in some setups that require certain benchmarks be attained (e.g. All labs must score 70% or higher to pass), or where minimum counts much be achieved (e.g. Proficient or better on 8/10 of these grade items).
How do I use Talon's grade formula editor?
Overall Score: Calculated vs Adjusted
Two overall score grade items are created for you: Calculated Grade and Adjusted Grade. Only one of these can be active for students at any given time. Calculated is the default and will compute a current score for the student. How the Calculated Grade's calculation is computed depends on the grading system chosen: points or weighted. The Adjusted Grade is helpful in cases where manual entry is needed for the final score. Double-check the settings (under Grades > Settings > Calculation Options) that the appropriate overall grade column is active before sending official scores. Note: if you copy a course, the grade settings will also copy, so settings will need to be reviewed.
Ungraded Items: Ignore vs Zeros
Under the Grades > Settings > Calculation Options tab, you can manage the general grading system (points vs weighted vs formula), which overall grade is in use (calculated vs adjusted) and how the grades tool should deal with ungraded items. The default and recommended setting is to ignore (or drop) ungraded items. The other option is to have Talon insert zeros for all ungraded items -- this will start the student in a rather dismal place so isn't generally recommended. Dropping ungraded items does mean you will need to enter zeros for unsubmitted work. This is generally a good thing as a zero sends a strong bit of feedback to the student.
You can also have Talon insert an automatic zero for the student when no submission is received by the due date. For this to work, the due date must be set on the item (i.e. discussion, quiz, assignment or publisher LTI link).
Grading Scheme
The default grading scheme is set to Percentage. The percentage scheme is the most basic-displaying the percent achieved on the grade item. Different grade schemes allow the system to display a letter grade or proficiency level or any other scheme symbol you find useful (e.g. ✓ = complete, 😢 = incomplete). Double-check the default scheme active in your course under Grades > Schemes... look for the ✓ icon in the Default Scheme column. Note: You can set an individual grade item's scheme independently, not every grade item has to use the same scheme (e.g. You want to show a letter grade for the overall score, but points and percentages for individual grade items).
Categories and Items
These are the building blocks of the Grades tool. Categories are optional, but useful and recommended for organization and rather necessary when using a weighted category system. Create Grade Categories and Grade Items on the Manage Grades page. No worries if you get a grade item in the wrong category, you can edit it and change it.
There are several different Grade Item types. The most common is numeric. If you want to enter a score, choose numeric. That said, perhaps a Text grade item could be established in the course that would serve as appreciation feedback, a quick update to highlight that you noticed someone (e.g. "Insightful question in class today", "Solid work on exam 2!").
Connecting to Activities
Grade items can also be created automatically when setting up an Assignment, Quiz or Discussion. These tools can be associated to grade items. When submissions are graded, the grades will show up in the Grades tool. When creating a new assignment, for example, click on the "Ungraded" text in the Grade Out Of field, and Talon will automatically assume you want to create a new grade item for the assignment. The new grade item will have the same title as the assignment when you save the new assignment. But it's not going to know what category to put the grade item in.
You can choose to connect the assignment to a grade item you have already created. Click on the "In Grade Book" dropdown menu to select "Edit or link to existing"... Options that follow will allow to you select a category or select an existing grade item to connect to.
Quiz Connections
Quizzes have special settings that allow you to choose when and if scores will automatically show in the grades tool for students. When quizzes have open-ended essay type questions, it's often best to withhold the score until after you have graded those questions -- otherwise students will be awarded zero points until you update their scores. To withhold the score, uncheck the "Auto-publish..." checkbox under the quiz settings > Evaluation & Feedback section. This will be checked by default.
Note: In order to delete grade items, they must first be disconnected from the corresponding quiz, assignment or discussion. How can I delete grade items in the gradebook?
Student View
Your view of the grades tool is different from how students see the grades. Not only is the layout different, but settings can be adjusted to display grades differently to students (e.g. Instructor sees points; Students see letter grades). Rubric evaluations and other feedback on associated assignments and discussions also appear as links in the Comments and Assessments column for students. To see what a students sees when they click on the Grades tool, go to the Enter Grades page and click the down arrow next to the student's name, and select "Preview".
To change what displays to students click on the Grades Settings > Org Unit Display Options tab. Select the options (points, weighted points, scheme symbol, scheme color) you'd like to display to students under the Student View Display Options. Note these can be different from what you see on the Enter Grades page. To adjust what displays to you, click on the Personal Display Options tab and select the options you prefer under the Grade Details section.
Entering Grades and Feedback
With all this setup, you will be well-positioned to focus on feedback. There are several mechanisms available for updating the grades.
Automatic
As already noted, quizzes can be configured to push scores into the grades tool for you. This will be the default setting for any new quiz when connected to a grade item. Review the quiz settings Evaluation & Feedback section if you encounter missing quiz grades in your grade book.
Publisher LTI links will often have the capability of pushing scores into Talon's grade tool. Each publisher is different - best to check with your publisher rep to learn of the options available.
Manual Entry
You can always enter scores manually into the Grades > Enter Grades page. Click the dropdown menu after the column title on the Enter Grades page, or after the grade item name on the Manage Grades page, and choose "Enter Grades." On the next page, you can insert scores and comments for each student. Overall comments for the entire class are an option here as well. All comments added here will show for students when they visit their Grades page in the course.
Tool Eval Page
Submissions to assignments, discussions and quizzes that are connected to grade items will appear as icons on the Enter Grades page. When you click on these icons, the evaluation page for that specific student will open. You can review the work, enter feedback, record a video, make inline comments, and if you have a rubric created, you can apply the rubric to compute a score for you.
Quick Eval Tool
The quick eval tool is great when you have submissions coming in at different times and across different courses. When you access the tool from the Talon homepage instructor resources widget, it will load submissions from all your courses into one place. Filters are available if you need to limit which activities you want to focus on. When you access the Quick Eval tool from within a course, it will only load items needing grading inside that one course.
Submitting Grades from Talon
Midterm and Final Grades (and Attendance) can all be submitted from within the Talon Grades tool.
- How do you publish grades from Talon?
- How do I submit attendance using the "Submit Grades & Attendance" button in TALON?
Additional Resources
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