Group items tagged

Doing the assignments you give may help you teach student some of the implicit skills and knowledge in them.

"Faced with the question - How much reading should we assign? - I think most instructors would agree that the best answer is: "It depends."" One way to break the tyranny of "coverage" is to deeply consider your goals for how students will make meaning with the reading you assign.

Kenyon's own Harry Itagaki reports on his experience using mock NSF-type grant proposals and blind peer review as the major assignment in his 300-level courses. 

Kenyon's own Harry Itagaki reports on his experience using mock NSF-type grant proposals and blind peer review as the major assignment in his 300-level courses.

This 2008 blog post from a mathematician at Dickinson College is the best summary of my thoughts on curving grades that I have ever come across. Other than the fact that there is more math in here, this is what I think of whenever my students ask me "Do you curve your exams?" Moreover, his discussion on assigning grades includes formulas that can be pasted into either Google Docs or Excel that will generate letter grades based on splits that you can set to your liking. (Note: I have my own blog post about this where I explain these formulas in a bit more detail. Just copy and paste the following link into your browser: https://cip.kenyon.edu/hells-bells-not-question-again-and-formulas-assigning-grades.)

"After all of the time I spent convincing students that these assignments were no big thing, I was sending the opposite message since clearly my grading problem was a real big thing." T.L. Cowan talks about designing a rubric for "low-stakes" writing assignments which motivates students and preserves her expressive style.

"The study presented here explores the responses and perceptions of a group of first year students at an Irish university after their first contact with anti-plagiarism software in the context of peer-reviewed assignments. The results indicate that the use of anti-plagiarism software led to a decrease in Internet plagiarism and to lower grades being awarded in peer reviews. Additionally, students were found to have a positive attitude towards the anti-plagiarism software in the context of peer reviewed assignments." - from the abstract.

A professor of learning technology discusses some of the questions faculty should ask themselves about effectively grading digital assignments.

A fair number of faculty have told me that their remote teaching experience showed the benefits of a more flexible syllabus. Here's one example of how to give students options for a final paper/project, but the most important part may be the discussion of how Professor Katopodis generates these options with her students.

What do classes look like as you move from infrequent, high-stakes assignments and exams to frequent grading of low-stakes activities? Warnock makes a number of claims, backed up by the literature - students become more confident and motivated, there's less incentive to cheat, the dialogue between students and faculty improves. I particularly like the last half of the article, where he talks about the practical elements of increasing informal writing or quizzing in a course.

Xtranormal is an online service which creates animated videos based on your script. In this Chronicle article, the author describes using this approach to help students learn to write arguments by assigning the sides to animated characters.

A set of sample assignments and suggested readings for faculty interested in the intersection of writing and quantitative reasoning, from Lehman College.

Resource page on quantitative reasoning from Carleton College, including example assignments and tips for assignment design, and assessment tools.

A good research or critical thinking assignment teaches students to refine their questions as they gather and review evidence. Do we give enough attention to the process of generating those first introductory-level questions?

How can we encourage students to take their time with serious study instead of rushing through reading and assignments?

When you borrow an assignment or part of the course structure from a colleague, do you note that on your syllabus? Do you make your syllabi (or other writeups of your course activities) available to your colleagues? What would happen if you did?

Multiple Kenyon faculty have assigned Wikipedia article creation as class projects, or participated in scholarly "write-ins" to expand Wikipedia's coverage in a targeted area.

Did you know that grades weren't widespread in American education until midway through the 20th Century? This article features a literature review of the history of grading, discusses some of the ways in which grading doesn't work as well for learning as we'd like, and suggests alternative approaches to assignments and assessment.

Everyone's looking for a way to make grading more efficient without sacrificing effectiveness. Most of these tips boil down to finding ways to make feedback engaging, usually by focusing on things the student can do to improve (in a rewrite or on the next assignment).

We don't offer "online" courses at Kenyon, but these tips do apply to our course websites and Moodle pages. It's worth the time to think how a student with a disability would experience your resources and assignments.

An example assignment from the HASTAC Pedagogy Project suggests having students submit their bibliographies in process to peer review. Getting students to review one another's sources can help them think about their own, and breaking out the research step fights the tendency to write the whole paper at the last minute. (A similar collaborative feature is available in RefWorks, a web-based citation manager available through Kenyon LBIS.)