Exam week seems like to good time to consider: what is the value of final exams? In many institutions final exams are becoming a rarity; At Harvard in spring 2009 only 259 of 1137 courses had final exams. So is there still value in having a final exam?
Beyond the stress, anxiety and sleep deprivation they cause for students (and faculty) there are two major criticisms of final exams: first, the lack of feedback opportunities in them; second, the false sense of closure they give students.
Lack of feedback: frequently the only feedback that students receive on their final exam is the final grade; especially successful students. Unsuccessful students may have re-writes or some other form of remediation, and get feedback on their final exam performance. Generally, however, successful students don’t bother getting feedback on the final even if it’s available; they passed, so they move on. This is related to the second criticism.
False closure: one of the problems with a final exam is its…finality. Students get a sense that they are now done with the content of the course and don’t make connections to related and advanced courses they take subsequently. This disconnect can hamper student learning in later terms, and development of more holistic understandings.
What are the positives of final exams? Among the most common reasons faculty give for having final exams are: they are concerned students will have forgotten the early material and a comprehensive final insures they will review everything; and want to test students’ ability to pull everything together and “join the dots”. After 14 weeks with two or three one hour chunks of time each week, faculty want to see that student can put it altogether, and even do something with it.
One other consideration, I think, in favour of final exams is that for many college graduates the way into professional employment is by way of registration or certification exams. These can be multiple, even day-long exams that are the key to their professional future. Not giving students the experience of that kind of comprehensive, cumulative, summative evaluation (including facing the stress and anxiety) would be doing them a disservice.
So, at least while entry to practice exams exist there is a role for for the final exam.
Love it or hate it Wikipedia is there, it’s huge and students are using it.
The website open-site.org produced a thought-provoking infographic to note the passing of the print version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, mainly as a result of Wikipedia’s pervasiveness.
Do you consider Wikipedia a reliable source? Do you permit students to use it for research?
After 244 years, the Encyclopedia Britannica has decided to halt the presses and go out of print. Facing the realities and the stiff competition from Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia Britannica will now focus primarily on their online services. But even then, it might be too late. Wikipedia has grown to be the number one source for students. In fact, many students will stop research and change topics if it’s not on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia provides a wealth of information with over 26 billion pages of content. Though the quality of Wikipedia has been questioned, the editors of Wikipedia, known as Wikipedians, are vigilant with ensuring the data in Wikipedia is current and accurate. Studies have even shown that Wikipedia is almost as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. This infographic highlights how Wikipedia has revolutionized research and how it has become a reliable fountain of knowledge.
Have you had the experience of trying to teach a class while students are distracted by watching the latest viral video of a cat on YouTube?
What are viral videos? How does a video go viral and what do they tell us about youth culture?
Kevin Allocca, YouTube’s trends manager, explains what happens when a video goes viral in a 7 minute TedTalk video.
He identifies three significant factors
Taste makers - those who have high cultural profile and can call attention to something and get the snowball rolling.
Communities of Participants – those who respond to videos in an imaginative way and create and share their own versions and interpretations.
Unexpectedness - the inherent ability of the video to surprise and delight.
There is a lot of engagement and creative energy out there that YouTube - like it or not - taps into and perhaps by understanding this can help us as teachers tap into that same creativity and energy in our students.
Leslie Marshall - Centre for Teaching and Learning
It’s that time of semester again when Student Feedback on Teaching Surveys are happening. Most faculty, no matter how long they have been teaching or how confident they are of their abilities dread them; few, if any, look forward to them with enthusiasm. So how can you read them and use them constructively?
Read Them
Seems fairly obvious, but what teacher has not been tempted to not read student feedback sometime? We don’t want to read negative things about ourselves; who does? But you have to start by reading them, and not just a casual glance through them.
They will provide useful information to improve your teaching practice. Keep that in mind and start positive.
Put Them Aside
Negative comments sting, exuberant praise makes us elated (and those who leave comments are most likely to be those who hate you or love you as a teacher). You need, in the words of Kipling to “…meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.” The best way to do that is to give yourself some distance; go for a walk, a coffee or an ice cream and come back to them later. If you can leave them for a day or two or a week, so much the better, and you can then come back to them in a more objective frame of mind.
Look for Trends and Outliers
What are the general trends in the feedback? Identify categories that they fall into; they might be related to the course structure, assessment strategies or with the teaching style. What are the positives? What are things that work well that can be used to strengthen the areas that are weaker?
Look at the outliers. It’s tempting when overall data and comments are positive to ignore the outliers, but they do provide useful information. Perhaps your teaching style is not meeting the needs of all students’ learning styles, perhaps you need to be clearer in managing student expectations. Do you have underlying assumptions about your students that are no longer true about all of them?
Think Ahead
Use the questions in the Student Feedback survey to plan changes to your course. Not to ‘teach to the test’ or skew the course top get better ratings, but use them as a checklist for course design and teaching. For example: could you make it more explicit how the course connects to job requirements? Can you build in more opportunities for active participation?
Close the Loop
Record what you plan to do; not just to respond to specific issues that have been raised; but to improve your course and your teaching, because we can all always improve.
Links for further ideas on Interpreting student evaluations
The resource produced by the College Sector Committee for Adult Upgrading can also be explored on Mohawk’s larger guide to blended learning. This guide is the same type of resource the Library developed for students at Mohawk. Feel free to peruse the blended learning guide as well as consult your program’s subject guide.
The primary purpose of this Blended Delivery Resource Guide is to serve as a basic, practical “how to” guide for program managers, faculty and support staff in AU/LBS programs who are considering a transition to blended delivery.
It features:-
Definitions of what is and is not blended delivery
Continuing from last week’s post on Social Presence online based on the paper from Inter American University of Puerto Rico . As previously mentioned, Social Presence is defined as “the degree to which a person is perceived as a ‘real person’ in a mediated communication context” - the sense that there is someone there at the other end of the computer.
The second component of Social presence online is the cohesive element.
The Cohesive indicators of Social Presence include:
Using inclusive pronouns to address or refer
to the group.
Using phatic communication, or communication that serves a purely social function
Cohesive communication builds the sense of community, and can establish ground rules for social interaction. Things like a welcome message, acknowledging individual’s contributions by name, such as: “John makes an interesting point”, and thanking participants - “thanks to everyone who contributed to that discussion”. These serve no other purpose but are purely social courtesies, in the same way as you would knowledge or thank someone face to face.
One way to encourage social cohesion between students is to provide them with a social space within the course, such as a discussion board for non-course-related posts that functions as a virtual “Student Lounge”. This allows them to interact in the same way as they would, for example, in the hallway outside the classroom.
Thanks to those who responded to last week’s post.
(cohesive communication!) - (using aside comment with exclamation mark - affective communication!)
What social cohesion strategies do you use online to develop Social Presence?
A paper from Inter American University of Puerto Rico highlights that an important factor in students’ satisfaction with online learning is the Social Presence of their teacher. Social Presence is defined as “the degree to which a person is perceived as a ‘real person’ in a mediated communication context” - the sense that there is someone there at the other end of the computer.
Social Presence promotes participation, integration and cohesion in the online community. It contributes to student motivation, and is associated with retention and completion rates in onlne courses.
How do we create a Social Presence in our courses and encourage students to be ‘there’ too?
Studies have focused on two types of indicators of Social Presence: Affective and Cohesive.
The Affective indictors of Social Presence include:
Conventional or unconventional expressions of
emotion, including the use of repetitious punctuation,
conspicuous capitalization, and emoticons.
Use of humor through teasing, use of irony,
understatement, and sarcasm.
Self- disclosure evidenced in the inclusion of
details of life outside the class or by expressing
vulnerability.
Simple things like responses such as “good job!” “Success!” to discussions as well as more formal feedback; comments such as “you’ve made it to the end of Unit 1, now take a break before we start Unit 2″; or having a profile in the course that discloses something about your ‘real’ life (I usually find posting a photo of my dog works gets a positive response). These help create your Social Presence and encourage students to develop their own presence in response.
We’ll look at the Cohesive Indicators of Social Presence in a follow-up post, but in the meantime - what are methods do you use to create your Social Presence?
What kind of ‘rewards’ do you like? Chocolates? Flowers?
What is it that really motivates people to do their best? What motivates our students and what motivates us?
Author Dan Pink explores research into human motivation in this entertaining animated video from RSA
The key motivators he has found to be autonomy, mastery and purpose.
A useful way to liven up in-class reviews and quizzes is to make it a game, with students competing individually or in teams.
You can even play some favourite TV quiz shows.
There are powerpoint templates which let you create you own version of ‘Jeopardy’, ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire’ or ‘Hollywood Squares’.
Free to use templates can be downloaded HERE
from Fayette County Public Schools in Kentucky
If you have classroom resources you would like to share, let us know through the comments below.
Leslie Marshall - Centre For Teaching and Learning
