 Hi my name is Nick McLean and I'm part of the language and learning support team here at Charles Darwin University and today I'm going to talk to you about understanding assignments and grading criteria in high-read courses. Welcome. Before we continue I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which I'm working and where you're studying and pay my respect to elders both past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across the lands. So what are we going to look at today? Well first of all we'll talk about understanding your assignments and think about the different types of assignments that you might encounter in your courses and we'll look at an example essay question and talk about how to unpack that. As well we'll look at the grading criteria or rubrics and how to use that to guide your drafts and assignment work and how lecturers use that to grade your work. Firstly you might like to begin by thinking about the different types of assignments you're likely to encounter at CDU and of course that's going to vary across the different faculties and areas of study that people are enrolled in but you might like to pause for a moment and think yeah what am I likely to encounter in my course. So of course there's lots of different assignment types you're going to encounter or students will encounter in their studies here at CDU. You know exams and quizzes usually online the quizzes essays are very common of course there's reports reflective writing if you sort of in the health and education studies in particular case studies lesson plans if you're doing education research proposals and there's a poster presentations lit reviews annotated bibliographies what's the difference between these two critical reviews lab reports if you're doing science degrees so these are the things as well as case notes and oral presentations that you need to start to think about and of course it's not a complete list but you know where do you fit on that list which ones are you likely to encounter. One place to begin as you are getting your handle on the expectations of lecturers with the different types of assignments that they're giving you is to go onto our study skills page and have a look at the assignment types that we've got up there and start to read about the different types and look at some examples and start to unpack what's involved with the different assignments here at CDU. So you want to know exactly what the assignments that you are needing to do for this semester where do you go and how do you find out of course the first place you need to go to is Learnline and find your units and open your units and start to navigate around the Learnline site and discover all the resources that your lecturers have uploaded on there and also of course the study plan and assignments that they've uploaded there as well. So start with Learnline of course. Okay so you've found Learnline, you've found your units, you've gone onto your units and seen your assessments and looked at the tasks and think wow I haven't done one of those in a long time or it's been maybe you've never done one before where do I begin. Of course you want to look at all of the information and notes and tutorials and lectures that your lecturers are uploading onto Learnline because that's often where they will unpack some of your assignments and scaffold and build you up towards the assessment work. However you also want to be able to unpack it a bit yourself and work it out. So let's look at an example of an essay question, very common assignment type essays and think about how you might unpack that to get a sense of what it is that your lecturer is asking you to do. What do you think the most common mistake students make when writing essays? You might like to pause for a moment and just have a think about that. One of the things lecturers often say is that students lose marks because they don't actually address the task or answer the question. So how do you unpack that question or task so that you can actually address what it is that you're all being asked to do and give yourself the best chance for good marks. Of course you need to unpack it and let's have a look at an example today. Okay before we begin and look at an example of an essay task maybe with a background first. Looking at this photo here what do you think some of the challenges this community might be facing? It's an island community of course. Well it's Kiribati and it's an island nation located in the Pacific and the nation consists of over 38 islands totaling 800 square kilometers and over the last 20 years sea levels have been rising in the Pacific Ocean causing rising tides around the Kiribati islands and these rising tides have resulted in many Kiribati islands being submerged thus displacing many people from their houses and placing them in danger. So of course climate change is a big threat to a community like this and there are lots of issues around climate change and Pacific Island nations. Okay so what's our task we've got an example of an essay task here. What are we being asked to do? Write an essay that identifies the issues of key stakeholders who are impacted by the effects of climate change in Kiribati. Analyze and compare two distinct policy options available to the Kiribati people and recommend the best course of action. So maybe you're studying environmental science and climate change is something you've been talking about in that course. All right you've got the essay task what would be the first thing you would do when you get this essay question? So you need to actually analyze the task one packet and we can think about three broad categories if you like when you're doing that you have to sort of look at the task words what are you actually being asked to do? And there's just content words what are the sort of particular topics or areas that you're being asked to talk about within the assignment and then there's sort of the scope or the boundaries that Elecra has given you that guide you in a particular direction and all of these together of course are providing you with a clear roadmap if you like for writing your assignment or completing your assignment. Okay so back to our example our essay topic and we think about the task words content words and scope what's our first task word there of course we're being asked to write an essay that's our first one content words what's our first content word there issues so we're writing about the issues or the problems associated with climate change in Kiribati and is there any scope in this task? Yeah we're already being asked just to talk about the key stakeholders the main ones so small players are not required in your essay in this example. Okay you might like to pause now and see if you can identify any more task words content words or scope within this example. How did you go? Well let's look at task words first being asked to write the essay you've got to identify it's you've actually got to find those issues and you're presumably you're talking about the the most important ones or the ones that impact on Kiribati the most but you're also being asked to analyze them as well so that's where some of your critical analysis is required by your lecturer and then your comparing so maybe you're looking at strengths and weaknesses or between the two policy options because you're also being asked to make a recommendation there presumably you have to justify it or you would have to justify that. Okay talking about the stakeholders so the people that are actually directly impacted the effects of climate change so you can't obviously talk about other issues that are impacting on Kiribati it's it is about climate change in this example. What else Kiribati? So you don't want to talk about the specific in general unless you're justifying it somehow in your recommendation and you're looking at policy options so you're not being asked to write the policy come up with your own you're actually looking at what already exists and then a best a course of action so in other words what is it with your recommendations and these policy options options can the Kiribati nation do to move forward and to address these problems? What about the scope? Well you're only being asked to talk about two aren't you two policy options so you don't need to do any more than that and what's available already so what exists so again you're not being asked to develop your own and it's the best course of action so just the one and there are the examples that we've just been talking about. Okay so you've unpacked the essay now you need to write it and of course you need to write your introduction first so that needs to be the first part of your essay and that's your first opportunity to demonstrate to your lecturer that you understand what you're being asked to do so let's look at an example of an introduction okay so let's have a look at an introduction you might like to pause here and read it first let's read it together over the last 20 years the island nation of Kiribati has seen a rapid increase in tidal activity caused by change in sea levels this increase is a key indicator of the impact of climate change on island communities and this essay will discuss how the key stakeholders in the remaining population of Kiribati may have some power to manage some changes caused by climate change firstly the key Kiribati stakeholders involved in dealing with climate change will be identified then the issues of reduced services and forced relocation will be discussed and finally two policy options main growth replanting and architectural changes will be analyzed and compared to recommend the best course of action so is this a good introduction would your lecturer be happy if they read this and feel like you're on the right track yeah probably they would so what is it in this introduction that the student has done to demonstrate that to answer that it might be good to think about the three parts in the introduction that the student has included there's a thesis and outline and background in the introduction and this is a really good way to start your essay a bit of background a thesis statement to guide your argument and then a bit of an outline as to where the essay is headed can you identify the three parts in this example well we can see in the first part there we've got our background really just talking about the situation in Kiribati and then we've got actually your thesis statement there and finally a little bit of a roadmap for the reader to guide them into the first part of your essay so your background thesis and outline great introduction it's clearly demonstrating to the lecturer that you are understanding what you're being asked to do and is guiding the reader in the right direction so you've unpacked your assignment you're starting to plan it you may be written your introduction just to sort of help you think about what is you're being asked to do one question you might have is you know well how many paragraphs do I need to write and of course that's going to depend on how many words that you are being asked to write and sort of generally I suppose you know two to three hundred words is a good kind of estimate for how many words you might like for each to include in each paragraph but of course if you've unpacked it as well that's going to give you some guidance as to how many paragraphs you might need to write for this particular essay so you written your introduction and now you're doing the body of the essay how many paragraphs might you need to write well you've got to obviously talk about the key Kiribati stakeholders involved in dealing with climate change and identify them and then you're talking about the issues in particular this case is reduced services and you know the forced relocation of people within those communities then you're looking at policy options and you need to look at two of those and then you're comparing them and making a recommendation all the all the while remembering the structure of a paragraph thinking about your topic sentences your supporting statements and you're concluding the sentence and of course the what you are using to support your arguments so one thing you might like to do after you've watched this video is just go back to your learn line units and find an assignment or an essay question and try and unpack it and think about how many sections the essay might have when we unpacked our example essay task we looked at the task words and here are a list of some other examples of task words you are likely to encounter not just in essays but in other assignments as well so it's really important to start to get you head around the different types of task words in assignments and of course some of them require critical analysis such as you know argue or examine analyse discuss assess and evaluate suggest and some of them are really you know describing or just asking you to extend on or demonstrate your knowledge such as you know illustrating or describing or summarising so really important to get you head around the different types of task words and again our website our study skills website has some more information about that but make sure you really understand what is your being asked to do finally I just briefly want to have a look at what it is that your lecturers are expecting from you and how it is you can go about finding that of course you can you need to stay in touch with your lecturers and ask them as often as you can if you're hearing barriers with your understanding about what the content of the course or what is your being asked to do but they apart from the assignments they give you and the content that they provide to you through their lecturers and lecturers and tutorials they should also provide you with some kind of grading criteria or rubrics to guide you let's look at an example so we're going on to our unit information on learn line and we're looking at the learning outcomes first and you can see a lot of the language is similar to those task words there that common language of academia and academic study and then we've got our assessments there there's four of them what are we being asked to do in this case is an online test there's an essay discussion boards and another end of semester tests and for at least that essay discussion boards hopefully you've been given some kind of grading criteria or rubrics to guide you let's look at an example using the example we're going to look at how the lecture is actually grades assignments so here's an example of a grading criteria or rubrics possibly for some kind of essay or research task what are we looking at first well there's criteria in this case we need to look at knowledge and content there's that critical analysis there's the use of literature and then your academic convention down the bottom there which is 10 percent then there's all your different descriptors that go with those which tell us the difference between high distinctions distinctions credits and fail and these are the things that the lecturer are using to guide them in terms of assessing your work so really important to find those read those get your head around those so we looked at the example of a rubrics or grading criteria in the slide before here's a chance for you to think about that in a bit more detail three questions for you to think about which criteria awaited the same what grade would you get if you demonstrated a good comprehension of text for resources and readings and what is the description for a fail and academic convention so going back to the slide before can you answer those three questions so criteria well knowledge content critical analysis and argument use of literature they're all weighted the same aren't they 30 percent and then to get at least a credit in your use of literature you need to demonstrate a good comprehension of text resources and readings and a poor grade or a fail in academic convention will lack clarity lots of spelling and punctuation errors poor referencing you know and well outside the word count which is generally sort of 10 percent above or below is the is a rule we tell students so you know academic convention if you don't put some time into that can you know sometimes be the difference between a credit and a distinction or distinction and a high distinction so even though it's 10 percent it's still really important that you spend some time on that so again you might like to go on to learn one and find your grading rubrics and think about how it's going to be applied to your assignments and if you can't find one get in touch with your lecturer so today we started to look at the different types of assignments you might encounter at cdu when we looked at the one example the essay but of course you're going to encounter lots of different types of assignments not just essays and you might need some additional help and our teams here to help of course so you can make individual appointments with us you can look at what units are being supported through the peer assisted study sessions we offer it might be one of the units you're enrolled in you can go back to the study skills page that I've shown you and of course we also run workshops and if you look at our workshop page you might like to join one of our workshops and get an opportunity to practice those skills with someone from our team and also we've got an email address there you can use feel free to get in touch with about anything good luck with your studies and see you around