As final exams and final essays begin to peak out from their lurking places, I wanted to provide some strategies for efficient grading to assuage some of our anxieties surrounding late exam days this semester. (My students and I were unlucky enough to book a December 20th final exam day.) Here are some quick ideas… Read more »
Peer review—the process of engaging students in providing feedback on each other’s work—is one of the most productive practices for courses that integrate any form of writing. While receiving useful feedback from their peers, students discover how others approach writing tasks. In doing so, students learn how to give, receive, and integrate feedback—skills that are… Read more »
As John Warner notes in Why They Can’t Write, “there’s little dispute that grades do more harm than good in helping students learn writing” (2018, p. 213). Grades are both a disincentive for students to learn and an imprecise measure of what they have learned. Students in classrooms with traditional grading practices—that is, those that… Read more »
When a student asked, “How many sources do I need?” history Professor Leah Shopkow took the question seriously, transforming her teaching. In an article she wrote about this assignment transformation, Shopkow explains how she went from answering, “It depends,” to truly teaching her students what historians do when they write. Unaware of the forms writing… Read more »
Instructors tasked with designing an online course often have two questions: What do I need to know, and where do I start? Our upcoming workshop, “Quality Matters: Applying the Rubric to Online Courses,” helps to answer both questions. Quality Matters (QM) is a non-profit organization concerned with improving and certifying the quality of online and… Read more »
Research suggests college students rarely complete learning tasks such as applying, evaluating, or synthesizing knowledge and instead complete tasks that require remembering and understanding information. Our expectations for students tend to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When we communicate high, but attainable expectations for our students, they will make significant learning gains. When designing a course,… Read more »