How can I assess student participation in Brightspace discussions?

Adding a grade item to a Brightspace discussion topic serves two purposes – it both allows that topic to be graded and aggregates student participation in the topic into one easy to find location. This guide will take you through how to add a grade item to a discussion topic and how to use it for assessment purposes.

Adding a Grade Item to a Discussion Topic

1.) Navigate to the Discussions page in your course and edit the discussion topic you would like to assess. Alternatively, create a new discussion topic

2.) Within the topic editor, select the Assessment tab. If you’ve already created your grade item, select the In Grade Book dropdown and select the item you’d like to attach to this discussion topic. If you have not yet created a grade item for this topic, select Not In Grade Book and create one.

3.) Enter a point value in the Score Out Of box. This value should match the point value for your grade item

4.) If you would like Brightspace to aggregate each student’s submissions to this discussion topic so they can be graded all at once, leave the “Allow assessment of individual posts” box unchecked.

If you would like to grade each individual post to the topic separately, check the “Allow assessment of individual posts” box and then choose a calculation method. The calculation method will dictate how Brightspace combines all of an individual student’s separate grades for this topic into one.