We had an education talk yesterday afternoon, because today’s colloquium speaker, Ann Martin from Cornell, has strong interests in that and wanted to talk to people about it. A lot of the discussion had to do with teaching students to write, and getting them to accept feedback. Martin spoke very positively of a writing-intensive introductory course she did about cosmology, and said she saw significant improvement in both students’ understanding of key concepts and the quality of their written work over the semester.<\/p>\n
Those of us who teach a lot of introductory physics classes with labs all said “How did you do that?” One of our most frustrating problems is that many of our intro students don’t seem to pay an attention to the comments we write on their reports– when we do two or more lab reports over the course of a term, the second and third are just as bad as the first, in exactly the same ways. Even when we do see improvement, in many cases it doesn’t stick– I had a student a few years ago whose second lab report was so bad that I sent it back to him ungraded, saying “If I grade this, I’ll have to give you an ‘F’ in the course, because it is utterly unacceptable.” that got him in to my office, and he produced an acceptable report. The next term, he was in my section of the second intro class, and his first lab report there was every bit as bad as the one I had sent back to him the previous term, as if I might’ve changed my standards from one class to the next.<\/p>\n
In kicking around ideas about what to do, somebody suggested sending students the comments on the report without the grade, which would force them to read the comments to see what they were getting. I said that I already do this, and what it mostly accomplishes is getting me sent a bunch of emails saying “I got my lab report back, but where’s the grade?” In return somebody suggested, “Just say ‘Well, what do you think you’re getting, after reading the comments?'”<\/p>\n
And, you know, that’s just crazy enough that I might try it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Not in the intro classes, but in our upper-level writing-intensive course next term, I may give that a shot– send them back their marked-up lab, along with a copy of the grading rubric I’m using now, and tell them that they can have their grade after they return the rubric to me filled out with what they think they’re getting based on my comments. It’d at least force them to read and think about the comments a little bit, rather than just setting the marked-up lab aside and waiting for me to post the final grade, which I’m pretty sure is what happens now. And it would let me know which students don’t care if they ever see their lab grades, which is probably correlated with not caring about the grades at all, and will let me feel less bad about giving them awful scores.<\/p>\n
This probably has its own failure modes, but seems to have some potential, at least for classes with a clear emphasis on writing (which I think is the real difference between Martin’s class and our intro courses– most of the shoddy writing we see results from the fact that the labs just aren’t that big a piece of the grade, so students rationally decide not to put that much effort into them). It can hardly work less well than what I’m doing now, so it’s probably worth a shot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We had an education talk yesterday afternoon, because today’s colloquium speaker, Ann Martin from Cornell, has strong interests in that and wanted to talk to people about it. A lot of the discussion had to do with teaching students to write, and getting them to accept feedback. Martin spoke very positively of a writing-intensive introductory… Continue reading What Grade Do You think You’re Getting?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,13,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-education","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}