Tag Archives: assessment

Letting students choose the format of their assessment

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I just love giving students choice: It instantly makes them more motivated and engaged! Especially when it comes to big and important tasks like assessments. One thing that I have great experience with is letting students choose the format of a cruise or lab report. After all, if writing a classical lab report isn’t a learning outcome in itself, why restrict their creativity and have them create in a format that is — let’s be honest — super boring to read for the instructor?

I have previously given students the choice between a blog post, an Instagram post, and tweets, but would next time open it up to include other formats like tictoc or podcasts or even any social media format they like. What I did was give them the choice of format, and then also the choice of actually publishing it (on either a platform that I provided, or on one they organized themselves), or “just” submitting something that could have been posted on one of those platforms but ended up just visible to me and the class.

So how do we then make sure that the different formats all have the same level of “difficulty”, that it’s a fair assignment? This is where rubrics come in. Your rubric might assess several categories: First and foremost, the one directly related to your learning outcome. In case of a lab report things like is the experimental setup described correctly, does it become clear why an experiment is being performed and how it is done, are observations clearly described and results discussed etc.. All of these things can be done equally well in a twitter thread and in a blog post.

If you are so inclined and it is part of your learning outcomes, you might also evaluate if the social media channel is used well (An example evaluation rubric for Instagram posts here).

And lastly — you could require a reflection document in which students discuss whether they did address the different points from the rubric, and where they have the chance to justify for example why they did not include certain aspects in the social media post, but provide additional information in that document (for example if you would like to see the data in a table, that might not be easy to include in a podcast). Requiring this document has at least two positive effects: Making sure the students actually engage with the rubric, and levelling the playing field by giving everybody the opportunity to elaborate on things that weren’t so easily implemented in their chosen format.

If you want to make sure that students really feel it’s all fair, you could even negotiate the rubric with them, so they can up- or downvote whichever aspects they feel should count for more or less.

What do you think, would you give your students such choices? Or do you even have experience with it? We’d love to hear from you!

Assessing participation

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One example of how to give grades for participation.

One of the most difficult tasks as a teacher is to actually assess how much people have learned, along with give them a grade – a single number or letter (depending on where you are) that supposedly tells you all about how much they have learnt.

Ultimately, what assessment makes sense depends on your learning goals. But still it is sometimes useful to have a couple of methods at hand for when you might need them.

Today I want to talk about a pet peeve of mine: Assessing participation. I don’t think this is necessarily a useful measure at all, but I’ve taught courses where it was a required part of the final grade.

I’ve been through all the classical ways of assessing participation. Giving a grade for participation from memory (even if you take notes right after class) opens you up to all kinds of problems. Your memory might not be as good as you thougt it was. Some people say more memorable stuff than others, or in a more memorable way. Some people are just louder and more foreward than others. No matter how objective you are (or attempt to be) – you always end up with complaints and there is just no way to convince people (including yourself) that the grades you end up giving are fair.

An alternative approach.

So what could you do instead? One method I have read about somewhere (but cannot find the original paper any more! But similar ideas are described in Maryellen Weimer’s article “Is it time to rethink how we grade participation“) is to set a number of “good” comments or questions that students should ask per day or week. Say, if a student asks 3 good questions or makes 3 good comments, this translates to a very good grade (or a maximum number of bonus points, depending on your system). 2 comments or questions still give a good grade (or some bonus points), 1 or less are worth less. But here is the deal: Students keep track of what they say and write it down after they’ve said it. At the end of the lesson, the day, the week or whatever period you chose, the hand you a list of their three very best questions or comments. So people who said more than three things are required to limit themselves to what they think were their three best remarks.

The very clear advantage is that

  • you are now looking for quality over quantity (depending on the class size, you will need to adjust the number of comments / questions you ideally want per person). This means people who always talk but don’t really say anything might not stop, but at least they aren’t encouraged to talk even more since they will have to find a certain number of substantial contributions to write down in the end rather than make sure they have the most air time.
  • you don’t have to rely on your memory alone. Sure, when you read the comments and questions you will still need to recall whether that was actually said during class or made up afterwards, but at least you have a written document to jog your memory.
  • you have written documentation of what they contributed, so if someone wants to argue about the quality of their remarks, you can do that based on what they wrote down rather than what they think they might have meant when they said something that they recall differently from you.
  • you can choose to (and then, of course, announce!) to let people also include other contributions on their lists, like very good questions they asked you in private, or emailed you about. Or extra projects they did on the side.

I guess in the end we need to remember that the main motive for grading participation is to enhance student engagement with the course content. And the more different ways we give them to engage – and receive credit for it – the more they are actually going to do it. Plus maybe they are already doing it and we just never knew?