Using Turnitin solutions in tandem for stronger assessments and fast student feedback

Every student on their own educational journey needs support and feedback tailored to meet them where they are. Instructors play a critical role in student development by providing learning opportunities through personalized and actionable feedback to keep students moving forward. To that end, Turnitin is working hard to empower both students and educators along this journey with products that support every type of assessment and make it easy to grade quickly and provide fair and fast feedback to students.

In this post, we illustrate the ways in which Turnitin’s Feedback Studio and Gradescope can be used together to uphold learning goals.

Most courses use a variety of assessment types to evaluate student growth through quick formative checks, such as pop quizzes or show-your-work homework, or through more summative work such as essays or multiple-choice midterm or final exams. For an instructor, providing a variety of assessment types can give a deeper view into student learning and help them to achieve key learning outcomes. Turnitin solutions can work together to provide students and instructors the right tools to deliver any assessment type, in any learning environment (in-person, online, or hybrid), and make sure instructors can grade quickly and students get the feedback they need in time to make meaningful improvements in their growth.

Long form essays and reports:

Turnitin Feedback Studio is trusted globally to identify potential plagiarism and help ensure that students are developing critical writing skills to do their own original work. With a robust set of feedback and grading tools, instructors have flexibility in how they deliver efficient and meaningful feedback directly to students.

With Draft Coach, an add-on for Google Docs and Microsoft Word on the Web, students can get real-time guidance on how to cite, apply grammar rules, and keep their work plagiarism-free while they’re in the process of writing.

Show your work homework, problem sets, and paper-based or bubble sheet exams:

However, writing an essay may not be the only type of assessment in use in a course, and for other assessment types Gradescope can help. Many courses require students to show how they are learning concepts and applying them through “show your work” proofs, diagrams, or even short written answers. After the past few years where it felt like everything was digital, paper-based assessments are still a very popular way for instructors to assess their students. Gradescope uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to handle hand-written assignments digitally so they can be graded quickly and fairly. In addition to paper assignments, bubble sheet exams or project type work such as recorded group presentations, audio or video recordings of art or music can be easily uploaded by students for fast and fair grading.

Best of all, if you choose to integrate Turnitin Feedback Studio and Gradescope with your LMS you can push rosters and grades with a click of a button, keeping all of your assignments, grades, and statistics in one place.

Scenarios for using Feedback and Gradescope together:

Turnitin’s intention is to support the entire learning journey. These are some of the ways in which our products can be used together to scale the impact of Turnitin as a formative, educational tool.

1. An English course: use Feedback Studio for essay and writing assignments, and Gradescope for in-class paper quizzes on weekly reading assignments.

1. An Art History course: use Gradescope for short answer quizzes on art identification, a bubble sheet midterm exam, and Feedback Studio for a final essay.

1. An Intro to Psychology course: a typically very large course, can still require a weekly handwritten reading quiz knowing that it’s easy for students to use their phones to upload their work directly to Gradescope for AI-assisted grading. Meanwhile, essays or experience reports are submitted via Feedback Studio.

Together, Turnitin Feedback Studio and Gradescope provide the right set of tools to:

1. Deliver any assignment type you’d like to use, including essays and long form written work, bubble sheet exams, homework and show-your-work paper assignments, audio or video recordings, and any paper-based assignment.
2. Safeguard academic integrity with anonymous grading, protection against cheating through question or answer randomization, versioning, timed assignments, and flagging deliberate text manipulation or potential contract cheating.
3. Maximize formative learning by giving a variety of formative assessment types, understanding how students are achieving their learning goals, and connecting with them with fast and fair feedback.
4. Meet students where they work by enabling Draft Coach for real time citation and grammar guidance while drafting essays, or using the mobile app to take photos and submit assignments directly to Gradescope.
5. Promote quality feedback by using tools like Quickmarks, comments associated with rubric items, or summative comments to help students understand where they are missing points and how to improve.
6. Save time grading with instructor tools that offer the flexibility of pre-loaded or dynamically generated rubrics, AI-assisted grading can group similar answers and grade them at once, or apply reusable comments. Grading with Turnitin solutions saves instructors time and gets helpful information back into student’ s hands as quickly as possible.

At Turnitin, we’re continuing to develop our solutions to ease the burden of assessment on instructors and empower students to meet their learning goals. Turnitin Feedback Studio and Gradescope provide best-in-class tools to support different assessment types and pedagogies, but when used in tandem can provide a comprehensive assessment solution flexible enough to be used across any institution.