I’ve been back on the Mahara podcast to discuss my work on relational grading. I am very happy with the title of the podcast.
Continue reading “A rebel with a cause!”Best Coffee in Town: Update 2
Another progress report on my Best Coffee in Town research project . . .
Whereas seven students chose not to complete the first StoryMap assignment, all seventeen did so for the second. Yay, scaffolding works for formative assessment! Well, no, not in this case. The URLs that seven students uploaded to the LMS didn’t work, which meant I saw the message below instead of their StoryMaps.
The instructions on the LMS for all of the StoryMap assignments contain the following statement:
You will need to submit the link to your BCiT StoryMap here. Your StoryMap must be set to share/public when published for this link to work. Review the Digital Literacy section of the syllabus. Work that I am unable to access will earn a grade of zero.
So, seven zeros, because these students didn’t bother test whether the links they uploaded actually worked.
The remaining ten students earned an average score of 12.8 out of a possible 25 points; i.e., they all failed.
The final StoryMap assignment is worth 100 points, the equivalent of a full letter grade. Will it be an exercise in learned helplessness? I hope not.
Best Coffee in Town: Update 1
Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal
Taking a break from preparing for our next blizzard . . .
A quick progress report on my Best Coffee in Town research project, which I designed to counter AI and combat grade inflation: students, or at least some of them, submitted the first of a series of scaffolded StoryMap assignments. While this assignment constitutes only 2.5 percent of the final course grade, it forms an integral part of the project as a whole. In other words, it lets students know where they stand and where they are headed.
Of the class’s 17 students, 10 chose to complete the assignment, with an average score of 9.5 out of 25 points. In letter grade terms, everyone in the class earned an F.
Will this change as the semester progresses? I don’t know.
The Power of Grades
N now = 2. I tried Terry Hathaway’s exercise in a class of eleven students. All of them complied without question, and when I asked why, the first student to speak said, “Because you have power over our grades.”
I then asked, per Max Weber, whether my authority was based on personal charisma, tradition, or some rational-legal principle. Students hesitated to respond to this question. Since they had been reading about China’s Cultural Revolution, I drew a table on the board with columns titled “Chairman Mao” and “Chairman Chad” to illustrate the human tendency to do stupid things like stand on one foot with one hand on our heads, or denounce/beat/kill our neighbors, only because an authority figure has told us to.
Educational institutions, at least in the USA, function as authority figures in which grades reflect the ability to conform rather than learning. Students perceive education as a performative exercise in which intrinsic interest is irrelevant, and they behave accordingly, a phenomenon that the anthropologist and ungrading advocate Susan D. Blum calls “schoolishness.”
In an attempt to encourage student curiosity and independence, I’ve been, like Terry, experimenting with ungrading, or, as I like to put it, degrading. It’s still a work in progress. This semester, for example, I have a barbell-shaped grade distribution in one of my undergraduate courses/modules, with a quarter of the students failing and half at an A level. The students who do the work, whether it contributes to their final grade or not, are doing fine. Those who don’t are not. Maybe removing the usual mechanisms of coercion also removes the incentive to engage in schoolishness.
I blame Cathy….
Today we have a guest post from Dr Terry Hathaway who (un?)justly blames me for his recent excellent work!
Terry works at the University of York, teaching Norwegians about the wonders of British culture, politics, and pubs. His primary research focus is the power of corporations, which he is currently writing a book on. You can find Terry on Bluesky at @terryhathaway.bsky.social or contact him at terry.hathaway -at- york.ac.uk
I did something rather stupid recently. I listened to a paper at the PSA Teaching and Learning Network conference and, unfortunately, was inspired
The misfortune with this inspiration is that it meant much more work, and it meant much more work just before term started when I had roughly zero time on my hands. The lesson of the story is, clearly, don’t be inspired (and certainly don’t go to the PSA TLN conference or you too could be inspired by great teachers).
Continue reading “I blame Cathy….”Encouraging student engagement with feedback: a student-staff partnership approach
This guest post is by Dr. Sara van Goozen, lecturer at the University of York’s Department of Politics and International Relations. As well as teaching and researching political theory, Sara has pursued research on inclusive assessment and feedback practices, and is one of the founding members of the Teaching Political Theory Network.
If you use Turnitin to provide feedback on student work, the image on the right may be sadly familiar to you: it shows which students have viewed the feedback they received. In this case, it’s a random sample of essays submitted by first-year students in January 2025. The screenshot was taken around 6 months after the release of the mark and shows that in the given sample, only about 50% of students viewed their feedback.
Although it’s fairly widely accepted that good quality feedback is important for student learning, writing good feedback is only part of the work: students also need to engage with the feedback they receive (not just give it a cursory glance!). And ideally, they need to engage with it over a period of time. However, there’s a good amount of research on the various factors which affect a student’s ability to benefit from feedback: on the teacher’s side, feedback may be vague, unhelpful, alienating, too detailed or not detailed enough. On the student’s side, they may not fully appreciate the importance of engaging with feedback, they may not recognize the information they receive as feedback, or they may find it difficult to extract lessons (and act on them) from the feedback they receive.
Continue reading “Encouraging student engagement with feedback: a student-staff partnership approach”Where’s Cathy? Joyful reflections on tricky times
I felt a bit bad when I read Pigeon’s post apologising for a short absence from blogging for Very Serious Reasons! (Happy to note that he seems to have survived the avian vet’s ministrations, though.) Although I’ve been editing the blog here and there with guest posts, I’ve had a much longer period of absence without explanation. This is despite the fact that I’ve got a long and growing list of things I want to write about, including replies to other people’s ALPS blogs that are buzzing round in my head. I will get to this, though possibly in the autumn, as rumour has it that people won’t be reading blogs about active learning in the summer. (Tell me in the comments if this isn’t true!) But today I can at least give you a bit of an update about what I’ve been up to and a few links to teaching-related things that might be of interest.
Continue reading “Where’s Cathy? Joyful reflections on tricky times”Reference lists: The good, the bad, and the ugly
I have, barring a few late submissions that will slowly filter in over the coming days and weeks, finished marking for the summer. Generally, the quality of the assessments has been good and it’s always satisfying to see how students have developed their thinking and their work over the semester.
Obviously, one of the things we assess when examining students’ academic work is how they engage with and reference literature. Despite guidance and recommendations on literature (i.e. on module reading lists and suggestions for journals that particularly fit the brief of a given course etc.) there are still some significant differences in how students approach sourcing for their work.
So, fresh out of marking, I have been pondering how, next semester, I can help students further engage with considering the quality and relevance of the sources that are making up their reference lists. With that in mind, I am thinking of running a brief in-seminar exercise I am calling ‘Reference lists: The good, the bad, and the ugly’.
Continue reading “Reference lists: The good, the bad, and the ugly”Have fun, be flexible and encourage feedback….
It has been an exciting month for me and podcasts. Here I am again, this time talking on the Mahara podcast about portfolio assessment, which I am sure I will write about here again.
This could also be a good moment to re-up a previous episode I did for the same pod:
Let me know if you have any questions about portfolio assessment that you’d like me to write more about for ALPS!
On Mentoring
Believe it or not, I had a career first this semester: a 100% plagiarized paper, down to the typos. And the student admitted it.
It would’ve been so easy to light their paper on fire and file academic misconduct papers, but instead, I asked them why they did it.
The short version: they just gave up.
The longer-ish version: we spoke for an hour, during which I asked pointed questions about their background: where did they come from? Where do they see themselves in 5-10 years? What was their plan to get there? What were their hopes, dreams, mistakes, and fears? What obstacles did they face, and how did they attempt to overcome them?
On paper, this was a plagiarism case. In person, this was a rudderless student who’s in college “just to say they did it, kept awake at night over fears of letting others down, and making a series of escalating poor choices with life-long ramifications, but who also had a journeyman-level trade credential.
I unpacked the trade credential. They loved the work! When I asked if they wanted to still do the trade, they said yes, and owning a business. When I asked why they weren’t tailoring their college experience to meet their goal of owning a trade-specific business? They didn’t have an answer. While I’m of the mindset that an enriching liberal arts education is more than a future paycheck generator, four years incur tremendous time and money commitments for which “just saying they did it” isn’t a well-thought strategy.
My decision:
1) I wouldn’t let them just give up and, in the process, light the rest of their life on fire. They rewrote their paper from a blank page and passed my course.
2) They’re following up with me in the Fall. Yes, they have an official academic advisor, but I want to see their strategy, even if it’s penciled on the back of a napkin. Mentoring includes seeing this through.
I’m hoping I made the right decision.