Grading and Simultaneously Providing High-Information Feedback: The Harmonized Appraisal Assessment

Feedback is important, but writing high-information feedback for students can be unrewarding for educators, given the limited time and resources that they have. To address this issue, we propose a new student assessment methodology for unstructured and semi-structured assignments, such as essays and presentations, that aims to provide an efficient and effective approach to the creation of high-information feedback and fair assessment so as to optimize the positive impact of assessment on students’ learning and development. The approach, which we termed Harmonized Appraisal (HAPP), uses the grader’s input on a relatively detailed grading form to compute the student’s scores on a conventional rubric and to aggregate a high- information feedback message by leveraging a comment bank. We test the key tenants of the approach in two undergraduate courses in Business Administration, and find that students consider feedback from HAPP to be of higher quality and fairer than feedback drawn from a conventional rubric, but we did not find a relationship with self-reported student learning. Looking at the effects for graders we find that HAPP provides greater consistency, while the time required to grade is comparable to grading with a rubric. Finally, we discuss how open questions can be addressed and how this study could inform future research on assessment.