Results tagged “grading” from PEDABLOGUE

The last time I gave a quiz to my Intro to Lit course, I tried a new variation on my collaborative quiz methods (see this blog's articles tagged with keyword "testing" for others)... and it seemed to work really well.

Have you ever posted a question on your quiz that you thought was important enough to test, but which you knew was likely to be one few students answered correctly? I had that sneaking suspicion myself, when I asked students to define "metonymy" in a multiple choice question. The term was not really covered very well in the book, but I did give a mini-lecture about the word and I thought it was important for them to understand...but when I was composing the quiz my back brain reminded me that I didn't see very many students taking notes at the time I lectured, and I knew it was brand new and difficult term to spell, let alone comprehend, so I suspected few would get it right on the quiz.

But I wasn't really sure. So I gave them a chance. After everyone had turned their quizzes over, I asked them to take a moment to circle the one single answer on they quiz they were least sure of. Then they passed the quiz to a neighbor (who, as in Quiz Taker/Note Maker, had to put their name under the quiz-taker's and would be held accountable for any cheating on their behalf). The neighbor then had to read the circled question and write their own answer to it down. If they felt the student got the question right already, they were told to write something supportive instead, like "way to go!" Then I collected the quizzes.

Once I had them all, I did a quick scan of the pile...and found my suspicions were correct. Most people had circled the "metonymy" question. There was another question often circled that came in "2nd place". I turned these two answers into brief discussions with the class, and since I became fully convinced by that point that "metonymy" hadn't really sunk in the first time we covered it, I announced that everyone would get the points for that answer, whether right or wrong. We discussed the second most-commonly circled answer and I felt that enough people already knew that one that it would not receive instant credit, unless the "corrector" of the quiz got it right. The same held true for the other answers that were circled which we hadn't covered in discussion: if the corrector got it correct, they "saved" the quiz-taker some points.

In the end, this didn't really skew the scale for the class or have any negative impacts. The only students it "hurt" were the ones who got the question they chose to be "saved" right to begin with but missed other questions on the quiz. But that isn't really my fault -- they had their chance.

So why do this, beyond hedging my own risk on quizzing the class on an "iffy" course topic (like "metonymy") that I wasn't confident I had taught well or that they would really know?

For the teacher, it saves time. I usually like to go over a quiz after we take it (often using them to structure a lecture/period), but in this instance drilling down to the top two answers which the majority of the students presume they got wrong helped me to know what answers were most pressing, and dispensed with the others, leaving me enough time to shift to another class matter.

The benefit for students, beyond possibly getting a few bonus points, is essentially two-fold: it fosters bonds between neighbors in the room, and, more importantly, it rewards collaboration. Not only did we get to have an open, collaborative dialogue about the most pressing material right after the quiz, but the "corrector" gets to be the quiz-taker's hero if they happen to save them some points. In this way, the student gets to see the value and significance in knowing answers beyond the scope of their own grades, and comes to understand that what they know might benefit others. They don't get punished for not knowing; they get to reward others for knowing! And many were proud of doing so in my class that day. These benevolent correctors were given a sense of power, in the form of academic philanthropy. I hope to cultivate that sort of "givingness" among those who have knowledge and skills.

One might contend that all I did was sanction an act akin to "cheating off" a fellow student, by turning it into a system for extra credit. I don't see quizzes as instruments of torture and panoptical surveillance. I see them as opportunities to make students accountable, yes, but if they are not integrated into the class period of the day, they feel like tools intended to police rather than instruments of learning.

In "The Bigger Bailout" -- the latest posting to Irascible Professor -- Peter Berger draws some interesting parallels between trends in education and the current economic crisis, claiming that "the sickness in our schools, like the sickness on Wall Street, is symptomatic of a national disease."

What is that disease? Surely Berger doesn't mean greed, though that would be my first answer when examining the trouble on Wall Street. I'm not sure I agree with Berger's position here, but it is persuasive when he suggests that there are no such things as shortcuts when it comes to both earning and learning. Although everything, it seems, takes funding, one can't throw money at a problem and expect it to solve itself; indeed, that can lead to an unhealthy dependency.

Berger mentions the promises of the presidential campaign as examples of the bankrupt agendas that set policies without genuinely understanding how students learn. He cites the educational policies in California and elsewhere, for instance, that mandate that all students take Algebra in the eighth grade, even when they might flunk out simply because they may not be intellectually ready for it. As an example of the "entitlement" mentality of kids today, he also cites policies in Washington DC and other cities where some middle school students are given a $100 a month paycheck if they show up to school and do their homework.

I'm not sure if these are inherently bad ideas for educational reform, and I still question whether or not they are really symptoms of any "disease." But it is true that changing the rules of the game to accommodate the losing players -- which has all the marks of a just and equitable policy -- can sometimes lead to problems in other areas that are working right, if it isn't done wisely. Berger makes a sobering comparison of such matters -- as well as grade inflation -- to the manipulation of mortgages that contributed to the country's economic mess:

Artificially declaring all kids algebra students isn't any different from contriving to turn all adults into homeowners or their shaky mortgages into sound investments. You can't get something for nothing, or from nothing. Legislating inflated grades doesn't make anybody smarter. Paying kids to receive the already free benefit of a public education substitutes the motivation of a little ready cash for self-discipline and the internalized desire for self-improvement and self-government that a free people require to prosper and survive.

The cash will run out. It's already running out.

Of course, Berger may be casting the blame rather quickly here. After all, schools can still teach "motivation" and other forms of disciplined autonomy, if the teachers of those classes have the drive to do so.

Berger in particular goes after the mandatory algebra laws, and cites a controversial Brookings Institute report by Tom Loveless that claims mandatory algebra fails many students. I'm an English prof, not a math whiz, and though I've heard about this legislation before, I haven't paid it much thought. So I set out to try to learn more, and looked up the Brookings Report. In it, Loveless takes issue with the way the problem is displaced in the curriculum (classes are merely 'renamed'; remedial courses don't seem to help; students aren't quite getting the college prep the mandate seemed to promise). But my reading of that report is that there are both positive and negative effects of such legislation. For example, it does help some students to learn these forms of math who wouldn't otherwise have been selected for "honors" or "advanced placement" courses. As the report puts it:

The push for universal eighth-grade algebra is based on an argument for equity, not on empirical evidence...From this point of view, expanding eighth-grade algebra to include all students opens up opportunities for advancement to students who previously had not been afforded them, in particular, students of color and from poor families. Democratizing eighth-grade algebra promotes social justice.

Some call algebra learning a new Civil Right, particularly for marginalized people who have been denied access to a basic form of cultural literacy. And it stands to reason that if one can't understand the abstraction behind the algebraic expression "x < y" then one cannot understand the fundamental relationship known as "inequality."

Empiric evidence should drive policy, but often this evidence is not present before a reform can be made and if we are too fixed on demanding it, nothing will ever change. Instead, value-based goals are more fundamental motives for driving such reforms, and they can be studied or modulated as they are put into practice. "Equity" is still an important value that shouldn't be abandoned in the process. One can and should have equitable learning systems that lead toward changes that will not only teach successfully, but also teach fairly. "Equity," after all, is also a financial term. If you blame "social justice" for the injustices of the economic downturn, then you're probably blaming confusing democracy with capitalism, concepts that, perhaps, also need to be taught more often. Public and liberal arts education is supposed to be democratizing. It is intended to promote social justice. Education liberates us; that is how it enriches us. When done right, it does not make any of us poorer. It may, in fact, be the key to solving the economic crisis itself.

I like how the Irascible Professor himself (Mark Shapiro) responds to Berger, in a comment appended to the article:

...The economic crisis of 2008, in part, speaks to the weakness of our education system when it comes to educating the populace about economic issues -- both at the personal level and at the policy level. Very few students graduate from high school with even a basic understanding of compound interest, and relatively few graduate from college understanding the dangers of excess consumption based on easy credit.

If the recommendations from alums I know are empiric evidence, then college students today yearn for this kind of "personal finance" learning. And what's more: perhaps we all should learn about an advanced math concept early in our educations: the imaginary number!

Educating students to be better, smarter consumers -- as well as better and smarter business professionals -- is the obvious solution. It takes time for an investment like that to pay off, but very little risk, save to those who profit from the ignorance of the masses.

Are we bending under the oppressive rule of children? Do kids have too much power?

There are days, I think, when every teacher wonders this, even at the college level.

Dennis Jerz posts a good response to this idea, particularly in terms of catholic teaching, as raised by Joseph Epstein in his recent lament about the Millenial generation in the conservative journal, Weekly Standard. It's given me a lot to think about, because I often have mixed emotions about inappropriate student behavior and obvious expressions of immaturity, which sometimes conflicts with my drive to treat all students as adult thinkers and learners.

Epstein grossly broadens this idea to suggest that we're living under a "Kindergarchy." [That's a neologism; as Michael Gilleland points out, the correct term is "paedarchy"]. Epstein has used this term before -- in a Wall St. Journal article celebrating Thanksgiving (because, of course, it is the least kid-centered holiday) -- so I think it's safe to say his suspicion of children is something of a leitmotif for him, if not a future book topic.

He's not alone: Time magazine even did a fascinating cover story on the topic a few years ago, "Do Kids Have Too Much Power?"

And it's an interesting question, though when it comes to college teaching (which both Jerz and Epstein mention in exempla), I think we need to be careful not to fall for such widespread generalizations about "kids today." Kids today are just like kids yesterday, but they have different cultural frames of reference, different ways of reading the world. And even while parents seem to be playing a larger role in the academic life of their offspring, I refuse to think of my students as "children" let alone "kids." (No one old enough to wear a military uniform is a child. A better word would be "initiate"...students are "uninitiated" into our learning communities and undergoing a transformation to join them.)

The adult/child divide is not only an issue of parenting, but -- particularly when pushed into abstractions such as "generation" gaps -- also a power relationship, complicated by fears of aging and the desire for eternally youthful vim. Often what seems to be a "grumpy old teacher" engaging a "hostile youth" is really a status game of some kind. In some classrooms, the assumed power position of wisdom (only earned by years of disciplined brain training) butts heads against the assumed power of the youthful physique (usually unearned, though it can be earned through disciplined body training); the classroom is a bastion of the mind, so I can understand why it makes instructors angry when, say, a student-athlete cops an attitude of superiority and refuses to "play along" with a teacher's classroom work. Yet how many teachers channel and project their hostility about their own aging out on the youthful students they have to contend and spar with? How many dream of eternal youth, aligning themselves with their students rather than owning up to their own aged wisdom and experience? To what degree do such psychological hang-ups and unconscious wishes get in the way of teaching and learning?

While it may be true, as many of my colleagues note, that today's students have a strong sense of unearned "privilege" that earlier generations did not, this does not mean that these students are tyrants who rule us. Unfortunately, however, we've all probably heard of -- or personally dealt with -- students who act like they "pay our salaries" and therefore should not have to follow our rules but in fact can direct us to do their bidding (when most of the time, it's their parents or the government's loans and/or scholarships that are "paying" us). The marketing of college campuses as commodities may very well have something to do with this attitude (as Jerz also obliquely suggests). And this, perhaps, is at the root of the problem: students are still "children" in the eyes of their parents and thus they become so to those who market to those parents. To us, on the front lines in the classroom, students need to be treated as adults. Or in the very least, adults-in-progress.

But I always believe it's a good idea to talk about these things openly; if there is a "power struggle" in the classroom, even when it's between me and a student, I'm all for calling attention to it. People at a particular stage of development -- say, 18-24 year olds -- will almost universally be coming "of age" about the world, and will have the same sorts of quirks, assumptions, hostilities, resistences, curiosities, presumptions, and drives. Good college teachers probably recognize or intuit the ways that people of this age group process the world, and can tap into it in order to generate learning. Often this requires dismantling the assumptions that a person of this age group has unwisely settled upon too soon in life, while also remaining skeptical of one's own assumptions about that age group. This is why I always enjoy teaching "education" as an outright topic when I am running a freshmen level course. It is a good way to get these assumptions about "privilege" out into the air, to be tested and challenged in a collaborative open discussion. Once students see that not everyone has the same economic background and different motivations for attending college, they usually modify and reflect on their own background and motivation and, ideally, how these are influenced by outside forces beyond their own organic will.

In Epstein's "Kindergarchy," he slips into a reflection about teaching literature that reveals his persistent struggle against the idealism of the young in his classroom:

...often in my literature classes students told me what they "felt" about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one's feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to -- but did not -- write: "D-, Too much love in the home."

Call me a softie, but there's no such thing as too much love, anywhere. This is a primary example of the "power struggle" I was talking about above. Epstein's secret desire to punish students for being loved as children by their parents sounds awfully sadistic to me, but I have to admit that I have felt a similar twinge of frustration before. (Especially when teaching film, which students are trained to think of as "entertainment" not "art").

While it is true that an affective response to literature is not wholly relevant to a conversation in a literature classroom, and that literary professionals truck with reason not emotion, these feelings still exist in any reader response and a skilled teacher can -- and often must -- train students to see how those emotions are constructed by the text, manipulated by the book and its packaging, their own assumptions, etc. Our very job, I think, is to wean students in lower division classes away from "settling" for emotional reactions as a telos for judgment. Yet this emotion is a stepping stone into criticism, and our job is to point to the river and say: look there, a stone that can help you cross over to my side. But of course, sometimes the teacher too must be willing to cross over toward the students side once in awhile too... but there are many rivers to cross.

[Besides, I challenge Epstein's assumptions about the goal of teaching literature generally: When Epstein says that the focus should be "what the author had put into the book" I would ask how one could possibly know that intention and why not just focus on the "book" not the author's effort; when he refers to "its moral weight" I would question how he "weighs" morals and if they are really as pertinent as he suggests; and when he mentions "resultant power" I would ask if he does not here mean the very emotion he was hoping to quash in the first place, albeit an informed one?

[And I wonder if in the memory he recounts, they were responding to a Dickens novel? Muhahah.]

Another way to get into this matter is to discuss the very notions of "childhood" and "adulthood" in the classroom and to unpack how the meanings of these terms are socially-constructed. A child in one country is not a child in another (just think of the drinking age or legal marriage age in some countries, and you know what I mean). Some are afraid that childhood no longer even exists. I teach an advanced lit course -- when I'm lucky -- called "Childhood in Literature" in which we discuss cultural issues like these, while surveying the representation of the child historically and culturally, across a wide range of fiction and poetry (yes, including Oliver Twist!). The course begins with theory by having the class analyze and discuss Neil Postman's excellent book, The Disappearance of Childhood. Postman argues that childhood is a social construct that operates only in relation to what we think it means to be an adult. For Postman, to be a child is not just an organic age bracket -- it means not yet having literacy -- which gives one "access" to adult "secrets." For Postman, the mass media of TV has erased the need for literacy to have this access, producing adultified children and child-like adults. When we teach literacy, we are teaching adulthood.

In another article on aging, Epstein himself seems to recognize the cultural paedomorphism -- that is, the extension of juvenile tendencies into adulthood -- that Postman has lamented when he writes:

I also grew up at a time when the goal was to be adult as soon as possible, while today--the late 1960s is the watershed moment here--the goal has become to stay as young as possible for as long as possible. The consequences of this for the culture are enormous. That people live longer only means that they feel they can remain kids longer: uncommitted to marriage, serious work, life itself. Adolescence has been stretched out, at least, into one's 30s, perhaps one's early 40s.

Many -- if not the majority -- of the college teachers I know are in their 30s and 40s. Many don't have "kids." You might leap to the assumption that these young teachers are perpetual adolescents who are so much "still in school" that it's become their entire career. (And anyone who wants to be quick to judgment can summon examples easily enough of some teacher they've met who dresses too young, or acts too juvenile, or goes out drinking and dating with students beneath their age bracket, or still loves comix, or plays games, or writes horror stories, or relishes stuffed animals in their offic, or watches Disney cartoons, or plays with coloring books and action figures, or does any number of activities that one might associate with youth culture. Does this make them perpetually juvenile, or simply interesting people who actively know where their pleasures lie?)

We as teachers need to be conscious of our outward expression of "age affiliation" as well as our students, but it should not control us or fill us with shame. The psychology of identity behind age affiliation is intriguing but very complicated, and the distinctions between childhood and adulthood are often false binaries. What Epstein might fail to recognize is that the "serious work" of academia is neither to "become adult as soon as possible" nor to "stay as young as possible for as long as possible" but rather to have a more consciously realized life, period. That's how I prefer to think of it. Shine light on behavior, perhaps even share one's own feelings, but ultimately let students judge it for themselves. To lash out at students with poor grades for "too much love in the home" is probably fighting childishness with childish behavior. It is not always what we do, but how we do it, that separates children from adults. Thus, we need to treat college-aged students like adults, perhaps most of all when they are acting like children.

Take a look at one of the course objectives from my syllabus for Literary Criticism (a 300-level course in theory and analysis):

"To become comfortable reading academic criticism and applying critical methods in your writing"

Seems like a good objective, no? At a recent faculty workshop on Bloom's taxonomy, I discovered that this seemingly innocent -- and to me, important -- objective may be more problematic than I realized. And by revising this objective I've come up with some strategies for strengthening my course.

I think most teachers would agree that reducing student anxiety about a course's content is a prime objective, because anxiety and fear can impede learning. Everyone knows that motivation plays a role in student learning. And what teacher of English doesn't harbor some desire to inculcate students with some awareness and appreciation of the "pleasure of the text"? But the problem my objective raises is quite simple. How does one objectively evaluate whether or not a student has become more "comfortable"? Is comfort-level really a measurable skill? Without utilizing biofeedback technology, it's probably difficult to assess (let alone grade) in an objective manner.

When I teach lit crit, I always encounter a latent fear and anxiety among students about the level of discourse encountered in literary theory. The reactions to the writing of critics like Jacques Derrida range from jaw-dropping bafflement to outrageous hostility. Literary criticism can read like a foreign language to a college student. The attitudes one develops early in relation to criticism can become a sort of baggage one carries throughout their academic life -- and many advanced learners carry chips on their shoulders (or, alternatively, a defensive arrogance) in regards to theory. So one of my missions in teaching the class is to encourage students to bracket off their emotional responses to (and alienation from) the Otherness of writing and to "run with it" even if they don't completely understand what a critical text is saying. It takes several reads and much learning to comprehend a difficult piece of theory, and I dare say only a fool would pretend to entirely understand what the critic means in some cases. Indeed, since theory is often philosophically abstract, the complicated syntax and the poetics of the writing are often required to encapsulate a thought, and it often approaches creative writing -- and therefore it requires a great deal of interpretive flexibility on the part of the reader.

Beyond the matter of "difficulty," I also try to encourage students to become comfortable forwarding their ideas and making risky interpretive moves that will advance their theoretical arguments beyond basic (and often "vulgar" -- meaning common and oversimplified, not grotesque) socio-historical interpretations. Undergraduate students who are finally "coming of age" as English majors aren't entirely comfortable having the legs they have recently mastered pulled out from under them. But too often they rely on habitual forms of interpretation that have worked in their other classes. When pressed to try something new, students will too often "consult the oracle" in their research and parrot the arguments of others, sometimes avoiding the advancement of authentic or original claims in the process. Trying to raise a student's comfort level with literary discourse invites them to participate more effectively in that discourse as an active critic, and to learn more about the value of alternative approaches to literature.

There are even more reasons why I would list "becoming comfortable" as a course objective, but the problem is assessment. It is nearly impossible to judge whether a student has met such an outcome using Bloom's cognitive taxonomy (although the objective on my syllabus does indeed use the term "applying," the phrase "to become comfortable" is the operative phrase).

The leader of our syllabus workshop suggested that I look into the "affective domain" of Bloom's Taxonomy, rather than the cognitive domain. He later turned me on to a very useful document that gives an overview of them, and I've begun looking into this material more deeply. The "Affective" taxonomy examines a student's growth in feelings or emotional areas -- it is an attitudinal form of assessment. Looking over the affective domain, I believe my objective ("to become comfortable") is most in line with this category:

Responding to Phenomena: Active participation on the part of the learners. Attends and reacts to a particular phenomenon. Learning outcomes may emphasize compliance in responding, willingness to respond, or satisfaction in responding (motivation).

Examples: Participates in class discussions. Gives a presentation. Questions new ideals, concepts, models, etc. in order to fully understand them. Know the safety rules and practices them.

Key Words: answers, assists, aids, complies, conforms, discusses, greets, helps, labels, performs, practices, presents, reads, recites, reports, selects, tells, writes.

And indeed, all of those examples and keywords are methods I employ in Literary Criticism to raise the students' comfort with the texts. Students not only write and participate in discussions, but even read a difficult essay outside of class and give a presentation to class about it. I am trying to raise the students' "willingness to respond" to criticism by asking them to respond with their own advanced critical thinking.

Here's how I might revise my objective:
FROM: "To become comfortable reading academic criticism and applying critical methods in your writing"
TO: "To apply critical methodology in response to criticism, through writing, presentation, and discussion."

Although that revision robs the objective of my drive to reduce student anxiety and increase comfort, it is easier for me to assess their application of criticism, than it is to determine their feelings about it. But as a creative writing instructor, I suspect that I am particularly attentive to student affects and attitudes and have some skill in helping students express themselves. I might consider mobilizing some of the techniques I apply in the creative writing classroom in the literary criticism classroom. This might enable students to move toward a higher level on the "affective" skill taxonomy, such as "integrating and organizing values" in relation to schools of critical thought. One technique I might adopt in the class is to ask students to keep a journal that invites them to share their feelings, gut reactions, and personal investment in the theories we are discussing, so that they might better integrate them into their own value system and career plans. Or I might ask them to express the attitudes inherent to (or, alternatively their own attitudes about) a particular school of thought through their own poetry, for example. In the past, I've assigned a paper that allows the student to write about their own "experience of feminism" and perhaps I can get them to do more personal writing in addition to the critical writing they perform.

I've only scratched the surface of this topic, but I've found a few useful essays on assessing the affective domain. Yeap Lay Leng's piece on "Learner Analysis in Instructional Design: The Affective Domain" offers an overview of ways in which affect is "taught and caught". Mary Miller's article, "Learning and Teaching in the Affective Domain" addresses how pervasive attitudinal assessment is in education, and offers good strategies for teaching in the affective domain.

In my entry "Remembering the Objective of Learning Objectives" two years ago, I wrote about Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives and how it gives teachers a great way to think about course design -- from syllabus construction to assignments. This term, our campus is hosting "Teaching and Learning Forums" which will specifically focus on Bloom's taxonomy. A group of instructors at SHU will be workshopping their syllabi with it in mind, led by Dr. Terrance DePasquale. We've only just begun these forums, but I'm confident that doing this with colleagues will be a great way to reflect on and retool my/our courses.

In fact, I've become something of a taxonomic terror this past week: my Freshman Composition course is writing their first major essays on issues in Education, and -- thanks to the suggestion of my colleague Laura Patterson (who is expertly steering our campus toward a Writing Across the Curriculum model) -- I actually used the taxonomy itself as a focal point for class discussion. I put the cognitive processes (knowledge, comprehension, analysis, etc.) on the board and asked students to tell me what they thought these words meant -- and whether they thought they were equally good at all of them. The students got very interested in this, once they started sharing stories about their high school experiences and the majority agreed that most classes never go much deeper than teaching "knowledge."

Then I asked them if the taxonomy was a hierarchy -- with "knowledge" at the bottom and "evaluation" at the top -- or if they were all equally important. One student interestingly posited that "knowledge" is like the hub of a wheel, with spokes leading to all the other cognitive skills. Another suggested that people who don't know very much are still often good at "evaluation" from their gut instincts.

The discussion of "evaluation" was most productive. Out of the blue, I suggested we evaluate something we all know a thing or two about, like "chicken strips." The class laughed at this idea, but then I pointed to one student and said: "Seriously, what do you like about a chicken strip?" She shrugged and replied, "I dunno...I like them crunchy, I guess." Immediately everyone started spitting out things they liked or hated about them: greasiness, dipping sauces, batter, meatiness, etc. I transcribed all these on the board. Then we set to wittling the list down to isolate the most important "criteria" for evaluation. I think I was successful at getting across the idea that there's a difference between a snap value judgment and true evaluation, which requires a set of socially agreed-upon criteria.

Then I opened up the proverbial can of worms: "So how do your teachers evaluate you? How should I grade your writing?"

That, as the cliche goes, is the question.

It circled right back to Bloom's taxonomy...and some grading criteria I listed on the syllabus distributed on the first day of class. I think my attempt at making students conscious of the assumptions of the teaching situation was a productive and positive move. And I hope they'll continue to think about these issues as they become more reflexive thinkers.

The problem with taxonomies, obviously, is that they become monolithic abstractions that can lose their meanings entirely, reduced to meaningless buzzwords. Bloom's taxonomy is wonderful, but I still think I prefer Lorin Anderson's revision of Bloom's taxonomy, which changes some of Bloom's terms from nouns to verbs (e.g. "knowledge" is "remembering"; "comprehension" is "understanding"). Perhaps I'll bring this up with the class later on. The point I want them to recognize is that not only does evaluation require social justification, but also that the criteria shift and change as social groups evolve.

Dennis Jerz' great Literacy Weblog alerted me to a new article up at Inside Higher Ed by Shari Wilson about the problems attached to night classes that meet for three hours, once a week, called "Once a Week is Not Enough". Wilson laments the lack of learning that happens in these longer, less-frequently-meeting classes. The crux of her argument is that there are "not enough practice-and-feedback loops to help students absorb, retain and apply information" in a class that meets once a week. Conversely, in more traditional courses, "students have a chance to replay the information in their heads and practice. With the guiding hand of the instructor, they can get even more direction and be assured that they are 'getting it.'"

At Seton Hill, we offer a large number of these courses, and our facilities often seem to be running at full steam 24 hours a day. Part of the need for these one-shot classes stems from scheduling conflicts that I would call "displacement effects": art students, for example, take studios that last all afternoon long, displacing their available time for "traditional" courses to the morning and evening slots. Other displacing effects would include athletics and activities held in the afternoon, nine-to-five jobs held by more and more of our traditional-aged students (in addition to the returning adults), and certification program conflicts (almost half our students at Seton Hill, for example, are enrolled in an Education Certification program, which functions like a double-major, forcing students to take overloads and pack those classes into their schedule whenever they can if they hope to graduate in four years). On top of the displacement effects that give rise to a need for these courses are some of the other motives Wilson mentions, such as acquiring adjuncts who can only teach at night, or adopting a consumerist model of accessibility, that markets a quick and easy education to the workforce by hosting classes during what is ostensibly their "time off."

It's also a way to maximize the use of the physical plant, since classes would otherwise lie dormant in the evening. Once night courses populate a calendar, only an extremely radical revision of the schedule could change the system, and it would require adding a lot more full-time faculty to a campus' roster and perhaps even building new classrooms -- an expensive proposition. So I think most campuses that have these systems are stuck with them, to some degree.

I inevitably teach one of these three hour long night courses a term. I acknowledge that the difficulties that Wilson points to are very real -- and that it takes a certain stamina from student and teacher alike to succeed in them -- but there are also many benefits to teaching these classes and a host of strategies a teacher can adopt to make them work as best as possible.

The primary benefit of teaching a once-a-week, three-hour course is mostly evident in the amount of time you are given to work with. Having three hours allows both more flexibility and greater focus. Obviously, you have more flexibility in a class with three hours, rather than fifty minutes; if a class discussion is going well and you want to extend it, you can do so. You can commit larger blocks of time to group work, writing exercises, than you normally would, and even screen films or enact skits, and still have time for discussion afterward. It's great for writer's workshops or seminars where entire books are being discussed. I find having all that time quite useful; nothing frustrates me more in a traditional class than having to cut something productive off because of the (virtual) "bell."

As a writer, I find that teaching a once-per-week class benefits me by opening up my schedule so I have more time to write early in the day all week. I'm a morning writer -- using the first few hours of the day to focus on my own writing (the secret to my success in this regard was the realization that developing my own writing is just as important as my students', and so I try to spend as much time working on my scholarship as I do grading student papers -- and I find it easier to write in the morning (and who wants to start their day grading papers, anyway?)). Luckily, my campus usually allows me the freedom to not have any classes until 11am for this purpose. I also can spend those three extra "workday" hours on errands or class prep. Jerz and Wilson rightly note that teaching a night class often means that you get students who can't attend normal office hours, and demand extra "night" time from a teacher, since they work during the week. But I find that office hours can be adjusted tactically: hosting one office hour a week in the late afternoon (circa 4:30 or 5) can often accommodate these students as well as other traditional students who have classes during the "banking hours" when most faculty hold their usual office hours. The only drawback, really, is that fewer colleagues, staff and campus services are available at that time. But I have "regular" office hours for those needs, too. Teachers can also host "virtual" office hours and help these 9-to-5ers via e-mail or online chats.

When you first design a once-a-week class, one problem immediately arises in regards to organizing the content. Because the class meets once a week, it seems like you will have to cram what would normally be three meetings worth of material into one session. Some teachers even rotely divvy the three hours up into three lockstep units. Inevitably, as Wilson notes, teachers wind up dropping readings and assignments along the way and "shortchanging" the class, compared to what students in a thrice-per-week classroom are getting. Teaching a process-based course can suffer, if, say, drafting and revision happens in class -- if you only have 10 to 15 meetings a term, it's hard to plan serial learning. But if one adjusts by trying to teach depth rather than breadth, these problems fade away. When I teach a night class once a week, I shape it so that a lot of the reading, screening, peer-editing, and information-gathering/-digesting happens outside of class. I've used mandatory discussion board work outside of class to keep students interacting during the week (though this doesn't always work). I might set up "study groups" that encourage the students to do group work on their own combined schedules. Students come to the meeting prepared to discuss, with questions written down or a reading journal and an already-read book in their packs. When I teach film, I often assign screenings outside of the class and schedule a time slot outside of class where work study students can show the films. The idea is to "displace" as much as you can into homework without compromising the course. That means making the night class less focused on information and in-class application and more focused on process and reflection. I design the class so that individuals are doing stuff outside of class that they can't wait to share with others when we meet to pow-wow about it weekly. This approach also might mean retooling some of the course content so that it can be applied to the world outside the classroom, where students might be asked to do more homework "out in the world" rather than book learning. I might assign a paper that has students write about an observation they make in their workplace, rather than write about an article I have them read about work.

And I adjust my own work schedule accordingly, too: I often have paper deadlines later in the week, so that I can collect them and comment or grade them before the following class session. I might e-mail a handout or reading to the entire class in one batch. And I make heavy use of the reserve room, for distributing reading material I might otherwise pass out in the classroom. Sometimes, if students need more hands-on direction, I might cancel a regular class session and instead host individual or "study group" conferences spread out at different times across the week.

Teaching a three hour session can be "exhausting" for teacher and student alike, but it's important to schedule breaks (one at the midpoint, minimum) during these classes. Aside from providing intellectual and physical relief, I find these breaks helpful to mentally shift gears and move to a new topic, and I usually plan my courses around the break. Even so, sometimes it's difficult. After a full day of classes and faculty meetings and office hours, it can be almost surreal when you leave campus at ten at night, under the moonshine and the sound of crickets. I try to schedule my day so I'm not in from 8am till 10pm, but when those days have to happen, I'm sure to take it as easy as I can the following day. It's often more difficult to teach a morning class the day after a night class than it is to teach the night classes themselves. I make sure my weekly grading is done with as much discipline as I can muster, so that I'm not madly prepping or racing to grade papers to return the next morning. As with all teaching tasks, time management is crucial to organizing your life around a night class. That's something that students, too, need to learn and I do spend class time talking about study strategies for taking a night class, particularly if I have freshman taking one for the first time. I also make sure that I remain just as demanding and challenging of students in my night classes as I am in the "traditional" daily classroom. Sometimes it's not the neophyte freshman, but the student who has had a number of night classes in the past that were mismanaged (often, unfortunately, by new adjuncts that come and go in the dead of night) or treated as "education light" who are the ones that carry the wrong expectations when they enter the room, and it takes a little work to get them to respect our time together as a meaningful educational experience. If a student is having problems staying alert for three hours, or keeping up with homework, I take pains to conference with them privately early in the term to try to coach them a little in the skills it takes to succeed in a once-a-week course. I might compare it to going to church, or other rituals that often only happen once a week, but which can also be life-altering.

I'm the sort of person who likes to learn new tips and tricks for using my word processor. As both a writer and a teacher, I spend a lot of time in front of the computer, so I find macros, shortcuts, and templates an invaluable resource for saving time and increasing efficiency. As a writing teacher, I like to pass along word processing strategies to students (like, for example, how to turn off the "smart quotes" or turning off those annoying auto-underlined hyperlinks in Word) so they can create professionally formatted manuscripts.

So I frequently visit webpages like Office's download page or the wonderful resources at Word Tips. I read books on MS Office (like Word Hacks or Windows XP Annoyances and I surf any number of Office-related weblogs (see The Office Zealot or The Office Weblog for good ones) and I even subscribe to newsletters (like The Office Letter and The Editorium). I install add-in programs like the wonderful WordToys macro set. All of these things help improve my efficiency, make me more comfortable using Office, working on edits, and helping others with the software. And some of these things are even fun.

Today The Office Letter included a neat link that I felt other teachers might benefit from: Internet4Classrooms. This site has an informative page on "Using Excel in the Classroom" -- something that's always been a weakness of mine, because I always opt to use Word whenever I can. Sure, most teachers are familiar with using Excel to track grades, but unless they're teachers of math or accounting, they probably don't use it for anything else. The Internet4Classrooms page on Excel has an EXCELLENT guide on how to make "concept maps" and flow charts in Excel (along with samples you can download and edit), something that has always baffled me in Word. If you ever use diagrams in your handouts, it's worth a look-see.

There's plenty of software for teachers available on the internet, but I like to find programs that enhance what I already use...for free.

Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 13:40:21 -0000 From: "writinglance" Subject: NEW FREELANCE PROJECTS on Directfreelance.com 4/21/2005

Dear Freelancers!

Recent Projects:

4/21/2005 - #21192 Foucault Philosophy Term Paper ...Article/News/Press Release Writing/Editing I need a writer to write a 25-page term paper (double-spaced) on Foucault''s philosophy. I have an article that contains all the ideas that are needed to write this paper. However, those ideas need to be re-written so this term-paper is original. Please provide quote me a flat-fee to for this service.

I subscribe to a fairly good Yahoo group called Work For Writers that sends out job opportunities for freelance writers, as a way of both finding new markets for my work and maintaining my own newsletter for writers and journalism students looking for work, The Handy Job Hunter for Writers. But this week there's been a spate of job listings coming in from student plagiarists looking to hire professionals to write their papers for them, like the listing above.

Subscribers to this list have been expressing their outrage and strongly recommending that others don't take those jobs. But some are defending the practice as legitimate "Work-for-Hire." "Work-for-Hire" is common in the freelance writing game -- it's what you do when you are contracted to write a single document for a company, who generally tells you what to write, claims all rights to what you've written, and almost always removes the writer's byline (replacing it with their own). It's the lowest job on the food chain for the freelancer, but for many it is unfortunately a necessary way to supplement income so they can pay their bills.

In most cases "Work-for-Hire" is legitimate, but being hired to commit a fraud in the classroom is obviously unethical (and illegal, though I've yet to hear of a school convicting a student with "fraud" for plagiarism). But it appears to be a widely growing trend. I recall seeing an interview with a person who makes a VERY good living writing papers for college students on the ABC special report, Cheating Crisis in America's Schools...and that writer was netting more money for a single term paper than most writers get for writing a department for a magazine. Nate Kushner's weblog got a lot of attention recently, when he "outed" a student who approached him via instant messaging, trying to negotiate rates for writing a paper on Hindu religion. And, obviously, term paper mills are still thriving businesses.

I've written here before about how teachers can try to prevent plagiarism in the classroom, but today I'm marvelling over the irony that I am BOTH a teacher who gets papers from students AND a freelance writer who is receiving solicitations for writing them for students. (If I were truly entrepreneurial, I would design a paper so difficult that students would be likely to turn to professionals for "work for hire," then take their job offers under a pseudonym, and write the papers myself -- which would not only net me some easy $ but also make them oh so very easy to grade. Hah!)

But seriously: this reminds me of the importance of teaching ethics when training students in the "business side" of writing. Whereas most college classes only focus on the aesthetics of creative writing, the various formats of business documents, or the effective methods of research, the ethical application of these skills needs to be emphasized just as much. Not just in terms of source citation -- but also distribution and publication of one's work. I have seen a number of advanced courses in creative writing and "how to" articles which emphasize the goal of making money -- and with good reason, because there are a lot of markets for writers out there that pay a pittance or nothing at all, preying on the writer's ego and the desire to see one's name in print. But they tend to go over the top in their advocacy for "guerilla marketing" and trading on your skills in a quest for a buck.

Oh, and what would Foucault say about that job listing at the top of this entry? He'd probably chuckle at the way a commercial worldview has blinded all who are a party to the exchange, and point back to his article on the "Author-Function" (aka "What is an Author?"). I'd like to imagine that the student writer who is soliciting a freelancer's "work-for-hire" is doing so as a sly and canny form of research about Foucault's essay on literature as property -- as proof positive that an author's name is a social construct that is necessary only to make the creator accountable for acts of discursive transgression -- but I somehow doubt it.

I just read Ronald A. Smith's great essay, "Competence Is What You Do When You Make a Mistake" (.pdf file from BYU's Focus on Faculty newsletter). I love that definition.

In this piece, Smith explains how teachers often equate "competency" with appearing masterful and therefore error-free -- which is not only impossible, but misleading. We get so hung up on avoiding the appearance of "incompetence" that we hide our errors and miss out on opportunities to model problem-solving in the name of generating an aura of mastery. But students should be made to feel like they can make mistakes too, if they hope to learn from them. Often the "perfect" teacher is the one they fear revealing weaknesses to the most. We need, as Smith concludes, to "demonstrate how errors can become opportunities for learning."

What Smith doesn't mention is the level of confidence it takes to admit mistakes in front of an audience. As a teacher, you have to be quick on your feet when you make a mistake -- and not let the embarrassment humiliate you or to listen to your inner voice when it whisper "you've been outed as a charlatan and a fraud!" The longer you teach, the more mistakes you'll inevitably make -- and the more confident you'll become when you respond to them. If you lack confidence, you react to errors to cover up your own ego-bruise rather than responding in a constructive manner that seizes the opportunity for enhancing student learning.

Smith's essay focuses on how he used to solve math problems from the book at home, then display his mastery to the class, never risking an erroneous solution on the board by doing it "live." But the mistakes he'd make "live" were likely to be the same ones the students would make when they did their homework, so he realized it would be better for them to share the error and collaboratively discuss how to solve problem. I like this. I'm also reminded of the day-to-day sorts of mistakes that I've made as a teacher, and how I treat them differently now that I've got a little more experience and confidence than I used to. Here are a few of the mistakes I've made, and how I've dealt with them, both poorly ("reactive") and positively ("constructive")...

Mistake: A student raises her hand to announce that there's a typo on a handout.

Knee-Jerk Reaction: Saying "I did that on purpose just to see if you guys were paying attention."

Constructive Response: Reward the student who discovered the typo. Ask the whole class to correct the error on the handout by hand. Then have them look for more typos, turning the moment into an editing exercise.

Mistake: Calling a student by the wrong name.

Knee-Jerk Reaction: "Jimmy, Jamie, whatever...you know I meant you."

Constructive Response: "I'm sorry, Jimmy. I'm great with faces but bad with names. I'm working on this, so be sure to correct me if I get it wrong again. In the mean time, let me make sure I have your name correctly written in my grade book." (Later, calling on the student again in the class to use repetition as a way of helping memorization.)

Mistake: Breaking class up into the wrong number of small groups (i.e., five discussion questions, one for each group, but -- oops! -- I split them into six groups!)

Knee-Jerk Reaction: Awkwardly splitting up Group Six to join all the other groups, one by one.

Constructive Response: "Group Six: why don't you guys come up with a question for the rest of the class that isn't on this list of discussion questions?"

Mistake: Misspelling a word on the board and being called on it.

Knee-Jerk Reaction: Ignoring it even when a student points it out. "Whatever...you know what I mean."

Constructive Response: Using the board interactively and playing the role of the poor speller. Erase the word and ask the students to spell it letter by letter as I rewrite the word. Repeat the performance for other difficult keywords in a sort of spelling game, transcribing what the students say.

Mistake: Forgetting to bring the instruction sheet or guidelines for an important homework assignment to class.

Knee-Jerk Reaction: "Just wing it...surprise me." Or, "I'll give them to you next time" (even though that gives them less time to work on it).

Constructive Response: Collaborate with the class to come up with the guidelines together, transcribing them on the board.

The truism that we "learn from our mistakes" is often reinforced when we confront them constructively with our classes. The handout with the typo is now well-edited. Group Six came up with a great question that I jotted down and incorporated into my list for the next time I taught the class. The collaborative assignment guidelines took them into creative writing rather than expository writing, something I hadn't tried with that group before. My spelling has improved. And when I shook Jimmy's hand on graduation day, I congratulated him by name.

A recent entry about the problems with student evaluations over at the anonymous weblog for "Bitch Ph.D." is garnering a lot of heated comments (as noted by my colleague, Dennis Jerz). Essentially, she's concerned that "our primary feedback on our work comes from children...18 year olds who don't understand what your job really is" and that "a major part of the reason we all feel so alienated and anxious is because we don't get feedback or praise from people who count on any kind of regular basis."

Having just reviewed a number of part-time faculty evaluations in my job as interim division chair this term, I can see what she means. While I don't think 18 year olds are "children," it's true that the evaluations are often emotionally-driven rants or raves, whether pro or con, and often don't focus on the teaching itself -- or, when they do, they're filled out like customer service surveys rather than critical feedback on pedagogy. While I typically garner very strong recommendations, the ones with thoughtful written comments that mention specific examples are the only ones that really help me. I'm way beyond doing this for my own ego -- so while it feels good for a moment when I read the evals that say "You're the best teacher in the world!" they are sometimes only as helpful as a blank form.

But student evaluations are only part of a larger process of self-reflection and administrative evaluation. What "Bitch, Ph.D." neglects to say is that we already are (or should be) the "authorities" on our own course teaching and that the best people to teach the teacher is the students because they are the living embodiments of our course objectives. Our peers also function as our continued mentors, but they can't sit in on the day-to-day experience of our classes. Though nothing's stopping a professor from inviting colleagues to sit in on her classes, and most colleges have a system of peer review. We also get our feedback in teacher development sessions and tenure review letters -- help that comes in an academic and collegial manner, not from some outsider boss up on high. Teachers need to take advantage of all the forums for the scholarship of teaching if they really want to improve.

Besides, she kind of misses the point of the evaluation process, too: the students really are the ONLY ONES "who count on any kind of regular basis." Not because they're the customers, but because they're the learners.

Of course, I do understand her point. If a class were a book, the sort of feedback we get from editors is what we'd like to get on our teaching. Students (esp Freshman) aren't really skilled in evaluating teachers -- and yet, perhaps they are to some degree because they've been studying teaching as much as course content their whole lives. The problem is that they haven't thought of what they're doing as students in a critical manner. But evaluation skills, too, could be taught in some classes and the teacher can "prep" the evaluation at the end of term. I often directly solicit comments on specific events, telling them outright how much I depend on their feedback to improve the class -- "last year's students who took this class influenced what I taught you this year," I'll say, and so I urge them to be specific about course activities. And before the class fills out their evaluations, I'll have them brainstorm orally while I transcribe on the board all the different sorts of class activities performed across the term. This works to get concrete feedback far better than just tossing the evaluation instrument at them blindly with a fistful of pencils. I also always seem to get better evaluations (meaning thorough and critical, with cited examples and thoughtful reasoning, not just "way to go" responses) in my courses that have writing workshops, because they train students to evaluate in thoughtful ways. Any class that has students engaging in "evaluation" as part of the course content can tie those same skills into the end of term course evaluation as well.

Anyway, I think the system is indeed a "weird gig" but I'd much rather have students evaluate me at the end of the term than some sort of outside inspector watching over my shoulder the whole time. A string of bad evaluations may not be a sign of badly taught classes at all, per se -- they may instead be a sign that the teacher isn't engaging in their own development as an educator (whether by attending pedagogical conferences, soliciting peer class sit-ins, or simply talking about teaching and genuinely revising their syllabi) in the scholarly and self-reflective ways that they probably ought to be. Students tend to write positive evaluations about those who genuinely care about teaching more than they do about their own needs and are flexible in adopting the course to the students learning...even students who aren't getting good grades respond positively to teachers who care about their jobs.

I'm not saying Bitch, PhD. doesn't care about her job...if she didn't she wouldn't host such a GREAT blog about education and she wouldn't have let those evaluations get to her. When bad evals sting us, they hurt because we do care. But we can't blame the students for it. The instititution might be partly to blame, but that's only because, perhaps, the system (at some research colleges anyway) is designed in a way that is more interested in what is taught than how it is delivered. That's one reason why "teaching certification" isn't required of professors. But when the scholarship of teaching is valued by a school, then the purpose of student evaluation becomes more meaningful.

A few weeks ago my Literary Criticism class was discussing Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author" and the notion of the intentional fallacy. Along the way, the idea of ownership of writing came up and so I asked them a question that threw them for the proverbial loop: "What if I were to collect your papers without names on them, and then -- after grading them all individually -- averaged the grades and gave everyone the same class average grade? How would things change?"

At first, the response was incredulity. "That wouldn't be fair," sums up the initial reaction. Naturally, those who assumed that they would get A's and B's were hostile to the idea, because the "average" would pull their grades down. But I asked them again -- "How would things change?" Some puzzlement followed. Someone eventually forwarded the idea that people might start working together or collaborating to raise the average. That was where I wanted to take them: into thinking about how texts produce social relations, as much as they are the products of individual labor. But the conversation took some interesting turns. "Would our grades be higher than the grades of a High School class?" one student asked. I didn't quite understand their logic, but I puzzled out the assumption behind it: that college students are inherently "better" writers than high school students (which isn't always true). The issue the student raised, though, was one of standardization: how, ideally, grades should mean the same thing across different classes and schools.

At the end of the talk, I added another twist to their thinking. "How do you think my grading of your papers would change?" Although some were wondering how I would be able to have any standards of comparison, some students posited that the grading might actually be more fair, since I would be grading based on the writing alone. I noted how this was the exact opposite of their initial reaction about how anonymous grading wouldn't be fair.

The chatter about grading took us back to the fact that some works of literature are "anonymous" yet they are still highly valued, even though we have a tendency to worship at the altar in a "cult of authorship" in our culture. I mentioned an interesting magazine I'm familiar with called Nemonymous, which keeps the authors it publishes anonymous until the following issue. Such discussion opened their eyes to the assumptions we make about authorship -- and authority.

Near the end of the hour, we found ourselves back on the grading question: "I still don't understand how that grading system could work," a student said.

"It'd work. It's simple...you'd all get C's."

The response was a collective "Eh?"

"A 'C' means 'average,' right? So if I were averaging the class grade every time I collected a paper, you'd all get a C. Heck, I wouldn't even have to read them!"

Class dismissed.

Obviously, a "C" doesn't always mean average. Even when teachers curve grades, the bell curve leans forward to a B at most institutions, thanks to grade inflation and other factors. Depending on how you apply grading standards, the class average could very well be an A+. Plus there are many different ways of grading collective work, beyond just averaging them all on an assumed bell curve.

The issue of grading collectively is an interesting one to me. I often have students do a lot of collaborative work and group projects, and the methods for grading them often come back to this issue of grading the individual vs. grading the group.

Evergreen College hosts a great collection of articles on assessment of collaborative work. In Roger Arango's contribution, "Group Projects and Group Grading", he explains that while some students might think it is unfair to give every student in a group the same grade if one person doesn't contribute, students need to learn that this is how it works in the real world, where the outcomes of group work are all that matter. Arango offers several strategies for getting students to "buy in" to the notion of a group grade, but it mostly comes down to spending time explaining the responsibilities of everyone in the group, and making students responsible to one another for the outcome of the group project. He also offers various grading schemata, which might include combining individual grades with group grades in the assessment, as a way of rewarding the students who seem to carry most of the weight.

In my Freshman Composition class last week, students gave a group presentation, leading the class through a discussion of an assigned reading. One student in the group didn't say a word the whole time. He's shy and very anxious when it comes to public speaking. But he also was responsible for drafting the questions that were used for the presentation, and made a really nice handout for the class to work with. I have to balance his individual work outside of class against his contributions to the group during the class. There are times like these when it becomes difficult to assess group grades, because -- in this case -- the outcome was a success. Should I punish the group as a whole for not more actively bringing the silent student into the conversation? Should I reward him for doing more preparatory work than the others, who performed "live" during the class discussion? Am I really prepared to give some students higher grades for, at bottom, being more extroverted? Although I want to reward the entire group for successfully getting my whole class interested in discussing the text, this is a case where a collective group grade would actually solve the dilemma, because part of the task of working as a team is to work for the benefit of every member of the group ("All for one, and one for all!"), even to the extent of risking one's own individual grade and expected reward.

Kathleen McKinney offers more Tips for Grading Group Work, which I might integrate into my Composition class' group projects. Chief among them is asking them to write a report about group performance, and even asking them to grade themselves.

The topic of exam stress comes up at the end of every semester, but a recent post on Dan Mitchell's "Teachnology" blog points to a new twist on this old topic: how test anxiety impacts good students. An interesting article in the "health" section of today's NY Times -- "Why Students Struggle When Pressure Is On", by Benedict Carey elucidates. The article reports that the extra pressure of an exam actually psychologically impairs the better students in a class, while having little effect on the mediocre ones. This comes from a fascinating study that is actually available online, "Why High Powered People Fail: Working Memory and 'Choking Under Pressure' in Math" (.pdf file) by cognitive psychologists Thomas Carr
and Sian Bielock, first published in the journal, Psychological Science. Test anxiety, according to the study, consumes the working memory capacity that high achievers rely on for their superior performance, particularly skill execution and the capacity to retain verbal information. Beilock and Carr write:

If pressure and anxiety target those high in working memory capacity, it would carry significant implications for interpreting performance in high-pressure situations (e.g., college entrance exams). First, it would suggest that individuals most equipped to handle difficult, working-memory-intensive situations...are the ones most likely to “blow it” under pressure. Second, as working memory capacity is known to mediate and predict higher-level functions from comprehension to learning (Engle, Kane, & Tuholski, 1999), such results would call into question the ability of performance in high-pressure situations to differentiate those most qualified to succeed from those with less capacity-related potential.

In other words, the "A" students are most susceptible to "choking under pressure," which means that tests don't reward them with challenges and may be punishing them, despite their facility, knowledge and skill. Another way of thinking about this is that tests don't adequately measure skills the way we think they do. Getting an "A" on a test may instead be a grade on one's ability to handle stress, which is rarely listed under "course objectives" on a class syllabus.

I didn't give any tests this term and I usually have students demonstrate their skills and knowledge via small quizzes and papers throughout the semester. But I do give tests in literature and film survey courses, not only because retaining historical information is important to those fields but also because any serious literary student needs to prepare for taking the GRE if they hope to go on to graduate school.

This material caught my eye because of a recent blog entry I enjoyed --"Exams: Hard vs. Unfair" -- by my colleague at SHU, Dennis Jerz. Jerz gave a very tough exam recently to his American Lit class, and took it as a compliment when a chemistry major told him afterward that his test was the most difficult she'd ever taken in her life. Jerz and the girl exchanged a wink and a nod, both proud of the challenge posed and met. I'd be proud, too, because it meant that I'd stimulated the strong student. Jerz writes:

I figure it's my job to challenge students. I'll curve the exam, of course... but students who work hard all term deserve the chance to demonstrate just how good they really are. They all deserve an intellectual challenge, and I'm happy to give it to them. It's only fair.

I've also harbored this assumption: that offering an "intellectual challenge" to a student is a just way to reward them for their scholarship. But I'm starting to rethink my assumptions about tests and the type of challenges they pose, because surviving a stressful exam unscathed -- while a skill -- isn't exactly a learning objective or a criterion for success in my field. Besides, I try to pose "intellectual challenges" all year, so a exceedingly difficult final won't be necessary. For the student, an excessively difficult test is felt as "unfair" not becuase of the challenge, but because it threatens to tumble the grade they've been building up all term. The problem is the betrayal of the endgame: while even the "A" students might be up for the challenge, they'll still be anxious because of the threat the exam poses to their final grade. When a climber reaches the top of the mountain, only to find another, taller, mountain waiting on the other side, then even the best of them don't think they "deserve the challenge." Instead, they think God is a sadist and -- like Job -- they must endure.

A challenging exam is a great way for the students who have done the work to show off their knowledge and skills, if they can handle the pressure. I think the trick is to be very careful about preparing the class for it. I try to do this by giving tough quizzes all term -- mini-versions of the exam with challenges of the same magnitude -- and even an end of year "practice" exam or study session. I know, from our private conversations, that Jerz assigns a lot of writing in his class, so the "challenge" in his exam was certainly prepared for by having students answer essay questions in the final test. That's smart. I'm certain that writing about literature, too, is a learning objective in that course, and that's another point to remember: that an exam should clearly be designed to adjudicate how well the student has met the objectives for the course. The trick is to be challenging while not generating animosity of any kind and not generating more stress than would normally be required in the field. (Another option, of course, is to waive the exam for the A students and proctor a "less challenging" test that examines basic skills.)

When I put together a creative writing course, I typically assign quizzes and a challenging midterm but no final. I figure that the midpoint of the term is the point by which the students in the room can be assumed to share a certain knowledge set that will enable them to share discourse professionally about writing. Since I tend to assess students progressively, guaging their process rather than the end-product of their learning, this works great. After the midterm, writing workshops go much more smoothly, since everyone has learned what they need to in order to "talk the talk" of writers.

A question I have that I'm still musing over is not what does a test measure, but what does a student learn from taking a test? Accountability for what they learned. The discipline of studying for an exam. And perhaps even the skill of performance under pressure. These are valid outcomes, but not necesarily course objectives. I'll have to keep thinking about this one.

Just read "Grading System Gets an F" -- a campus newspaper article by a student at my alma mater, University of Oregon -- which is getting some great buzz and commentary at Jerz' weblog right now. In the article, Ailee Slater complains:

the University system makes absolutely no sense. Students pay teachers to educate us, yet they are then allowed to tell us how much we're learning. The whole situation seems akin to a boss paying her employee to clean toilets and the employee turning around and telling the employer how much she is or isn't happy with the cleaning job. If I'm paying someone to do my housekeeping, I'll be the one to tell the receiver of my hard-earned money exactly how well they did. Shouldn't it be the same with education?

I don't mean to pick on a student essay, but this viewpoint is so common that it begs discussion. Slater's argument is logical only in a consumerist model of education, where tuition is assumed to buy a diploma -- which is reinforced sometimes by institutions, in their zeal to generate profit, or by teachers who adopt Friere's banking model of education. I don't necessarily blame the students who feel this way because they are the symptoms of the economy of education, but what disappoints me is the lack of self-awareness that happens among some college students who are just in it for the diploma.

This is why I like having students write argumentative essays about "education" in my Freshman Comp course. In discussions I like to posit that college is sort of like a private gym: you pay to work. It is easy to confuse the "investment" one makes in education as "capital gains" -- but the company a student is investing in is himself. Moreover, what a lot of students don't realize is that college credit is social capital that must be earned, like a wage without currency. You get what you earn, but it's still labor.

Some students don't "buy" that point. Some think that college credit doesn't mean jack squat -- it's the diploma and the line on the resume that means everything. But that's not true: college credit is tranferable, and the diploma signifies a total of credits earned. Others feel they've already done the "work" by earning enough to pay for college or sweating through the ring-jumps it takes to get into a particular school, and therefore deserve the reward of the high grades or diplomas. But that's not true: even in the workplace, you are paid the same no matter if you have to crawl ten miles to get to work ever day or if you are carted to your workplace in a fancy limosine. Others are just spoiled and their sense of entitlement makes them feel like they shouldn't have to work at all. But obviously, "daddy" isn't doing the work for you.

It's important for students to learn the context in which they're immersed, particularly when it comes to the assumptions that surround the college education they're investing in. Applying critical pedagogy in the classroom can help make this happen.

On his weblog, Dennis Jerz responds to James Lang's essay, "Failing to Motivate" in a recent issue of The Chronicle. Lang's article anecdotally addresses the assumption that a low grade can motivate a student to work harder, arguing that "we don't know our students well enough to make the kinds of judgments about their self-confidence and circumstances that would enable us to calibrate their grades to achieve the desired level of motivation we want."

As I posted in my comment on Jerz' Literacy Weblog, I think that assumption is both true and false. While we're not psychologists who are specialists in behavior modification, researching student motives by spending hours and hours learning each "client's" case history, we do have an opportunity as a teacher to better know our students through conferencing, informal chats, journaling and other personalizing strategies. Moreover, when grading is approached as progressive assessment (as it ostensibly is in any portfolio-based course) then grading the "process" along the way is a part of student motivation. If we assess the "product" by evaluating the "outcome" alone, this could lead to the disenfranchisement of the student -- and the desire to judge the end product could be a symptom of the teacher's unwillingness to engage with the students' process in the first place, working as "inspector" at the paper factory rather than "coach."

He's also correct to some degree. Grades don't "fail" to motivate, they just don't motivate everyone the same way. They're founded on assumption that they can "reward or punish" following the behaviorist school of psychology. Students who feel alienated or victimized by the constant battering of reward-or-punish strategies from their parents, schools, peers sometimes "drop out" of that game altogether, withdrawing into apathy. Since the behaviorist model is built on the assumption that "man is nothing more than a machine that responds to conditioning" to the stimulae of pleasure and pain, I can see how the systematization of the model leads to a form of "alienated labor." in the political economy of education. (Such "meritocratic ideology" is explored in an online excerpt from Bowles and Gintis' Schooling in Capitalist America).

If we were to abandon hierarchical grading in favor of "pass-fail" courses, would the students be more or less motivated? The answer is probably that motivational levels would work out about the same, because teachers have many ways of "rewarding or punishing" students -- or skirting that game of behaviorism altogether (the latter seems to become an important skill when teaching non-traditional adult students). Ultimately, the teacher can make all the difference in setting up the rules of the game, being the ringleader of the course, personalizing the experience, and engaging students via an array of pedagogical strategies. Grades are just one tool in the toolbox. And just as every mechanic isn't a whiz with every tool in the box, a teacher needs to try alternative tools to see what works best when she wields it.

I caught news of the just-released 2004 National Survey of Student Engagement in a recent article in The Chronicle (which is available online for a limited time). Addressing the degree to which students are "engaged" in their studies, it also features some interesting results about college student study habits, student "selectivity" among college admissions, grade inflation, and more. There's way too much to cover here -- if you're interested in recent changes in collegiate life, I recommend you read and muse over the findings by downlowding the report (.pdf format).

Overall, students are happier with their college lives than in years past and while they're studying far less than their profs would assume is necessary to succeed in their classes (and still getting Bs or higher, for the most part), colleges seem to have become vastly more "student-friendly" than in the past. One interesting realization I had while reviewing the data was that students seem to talk more with their peers about substantial issues and education than they do with their teachers outside of class. Although I'm sure that learning takes place, and all is not glum in the NSSE report, the general devaluation of the role of the professor in the student's academic life is a bit worrisome to me.

I'm resisting the urge to launch into a series of complaints about anti-intellectual shifts in our culture, the commodification of collegiate educational systems, and the general malaise and hostility of today's youth toward anything that doesn't give them immediate pleasure or a wage that can buy pleasure later on. I'm reminded instead that I still have power as a teacher to shape and transform the thinking of my students, to challenge their assumptions and engage them in thinking contextually about themselves and others. One way to do that is to remember that I'm a role model of the engaged thinker. And to challenge my own assumptions and continue to pay attention to the context in which student learning takes place. Students might not be as engaged today as they used to be, but if I'm engaged fully in the learning process, I'll be doing all I can to try to get them to be engaged, too.

Here's a handy refresher of strategies for engaging students, provided by Val Farmer-Dougan and Kathleen McKinney at Illinois State University, part of an excellent Center for the Advancement of Teaching which hosts a great deal of information on this topic.

I've been a longtime user of a PDA (a Sony Clie with PalmOS) -- given a keyboard, it's become my substitute laptop for traveling, and I love to write on it when I'm on the road. A few years ago, I did a creative writing experiment with it (which developed into my book, Gorelets: Unpleasant Poems) and, along with Agendus Datebook, I use an excellent outlining tool called ShadowPlan to plan and organize my life.

This semester I've decided to bring the PDA into my teaching a little more actively. I just purchased Teacher's P.E.T. -- an interesting student management tool that includes a portable electronic gradebook. I worry that it's more suitable for courses where there are regular tests and quizzes than impromptu writing assignments, but I'm willing to give it a shot. It features "category weighting" of grades which, I think, might work well for my purposes. There's also a Windows' desktop add-on which I might look into down the line.

What I expect will be tricky: a) to remember to carry the PDA with me to class; b) not be impeded by the act of weilding a stylus on a small screen (paper and pen is always easier) -- hitting the checkboxes accurately is important; c) ensure visibility given the classroom lighting; d) keep regular backups and enable security features in case of emergencies; and e) try to keep my cool and not look too geeky in the front of the classroom.

Handango features many handheld software teaching aids if you're thinking about doing something along these lines, too. Handheld learning is becoming more and more common. Many schools have already made Palm Pilots an active part of their classes, with students performing work on them and "beaming" assignments to the teacher and so forth. Some teachers are doing pioneering work along these lines. PalmOne is supporting the growing industry. GoKnow seems to offer some very good educational tools in this regard (for example, their PicoMap is a neat "mind mapping/brainstorming" tool. You can find a great list of links on Midge Frazel's page, Tips and Tricks for Using Handhelds in the Classroom, which is intended to accompany her book by the same title.

One of the lessons here is that Palm Pilots aren't only being used for high tech cheating. Like all technology, it's only a tool -- it's up to teachers to make it pedagogical.

Take, for example, the student who wants to use the office hour as a time to unpack all kinds of excuses for missed classes and/or late work. Most of these melodramatic performances are as boring as they are, well, dubious. So, I tell such students that I'm willing to listen to their sad tales, but only after they sign a release form giving me all rights to the material for stage, screen, and television. I mean it as a joke, although when one student laid out the story of how his ex-girlfriend let herself into his apartment (she still had a key) and took a meat cleaver to his water bed -- all this by way of explaining how his paper "drowned" -- I am now glad that I have possession of the signed form.-- Sanford Pinsker, The Irascible Professor

Ingenious thinking! I love Pinsker's idea in the article cited above, about putting a model "A" paper from the class assignment in the departmental office (or if I were doing it, online or on reserve), and demanding that students read it before they come to his office to argue for a higher grade. It turns the experience into a learning moment, even if it doesn't entirely dissuade the angry student from complaining.

I seem to get a lot of traffic during office hours, and I prefer that to the solitude that I might otherwise garner if I, say, held them at 8am or put a "do not disturb" sign on my door. Here's some random thoughts about how I approach them:

• Scheduling: I try to stagger my hours in my weekly schedule, if possible. What that means is I might hold them at 2pm on Mon/Wed and on 4pm on Tues/Thurs. Making myself available on even and odd days (e.g Mondays and Tuesdays, not just Mon Wed Fri) ensures that students will be less likely to have classes blocked out during my hours. I also recognize that students are more likely to come visit during afternoons or early evenings than early mornings. I always try to have at least one hour in the very late afternoon, for commuters or adult students: usually this is a 5-6pm block of time, scheduled right before a night class.

  
  

• Course Management: Obviously, you can get a lot of grading done during office hours, especially if no one drops by. I usually put my office hours in time slots before I have to teach, in order that I might get any last minute prepping/copying/reading done before a particular class. For classes that meet two days a week or less -- like my night classes -- I often make my office hours a paper collection deadline, asking students to drop off papers during my office hours. That often also invites some of them to drop by and talk about class issues...though many act like they have a train to catch.

  
  

• One Mandatory Meeting: In my writing classes, I typically have one mandatory meeting in my office with the student, to talk about a paper I've recently commented on. I ask them to bring their various drafts, and the readings they're responding to (or the research they've acquired, if any). I try to do this early in the term; especially with freshmen, it "humanizes" the process of learning for them, and opens many new students' eyes to the fact that office hours really are for them. After the "mandatory" meeting, which students usually find liberating in some way, I typically get a number of "returning" visits. In the very least, I know that they will be more willing to talk during class discussions. They suddenly feel a personal investment in the class they hadn't felt before.

  
  

• Consulting Hours: Maybe office hours should be "consulting hours" instead. "Office" is too officious. I find it odd that students pay thousands of dollars to consult with us in class, but rarely take advantage of the office hours. I think one of the reasons that students avoid office hours is out of fear: territorial studies would tell us that the office is the professor's "turf" whereas a classroom is more of an open field, in comparison. It's good to hold "office hours" outside of the office -- whether they're through "virtual office hours" (where you sit in a chatroom or promise to answer e-mail questions rapidly) or simply by arranging in advance to hold hours in the student union building, or a talk-friendly section of the library, or even out on the lawn. Bring a book or some papers to grade, and wait. I sometimes put post-it notes on my office door that say something like: "I'm downstairs in the cafeteria today: come join me."

  
  

• Furniture Talk: The way that desks and chairs are arranged in a professor's office send subtle signals. If you use your desk to block your doorway with a confrontational barrier like they do at, say, a police station, well then you're not only being uninviting, you're also responsible for all those nervous tics the students make when they do come talk to you. Think of the angles of the furniture: are they more "open" than "closed"? Do they invite conversation and informality, or do they put too many barriers between you and the student. While it's true that you may not want to be completely open and intimite with your students -- like, say, sitting beside them on a big puffy couch -- you might find that rearranging the furniture liberates some of the angst students have when they come to your office. So will little details like having family pictures on the desk, putting art on the walls that reflects your personality, having knick nacks or other things that students can look at when they want to avoid eye contact, or conversation pieces to get the shy ones talking...etc., etc. Be professional, yet open. [By the way, always be on the look-out for opportunities to trade office furnishings: sometimes you can get a chair or table from another building on campus, if they're refurnishing or throwing old materials out.]

  
  

• Order: This is probably my biggest weakness. And I'm not alone. Most of the professors I know are a little disorderly. We've all got too much on our mind to be troubled with filing all that paperwork on our tabletop or straightening out our bookshelves. It's tough to keep everything organized and in its place. I'm terrible with my inbox: it's still overflowing with last year's flyers and invitations. I've also still got a poster/calendar from 2002 on the wall. But I know I can do better. I'm not anal retentive about keeping my office clean and organized, but I do believe that the messier it is, the less respect I get from students (though I'm sure most of their dorm rooms are probably condemnable). Students expect their leaders to be more organized than they are; some go so far as to assume that a disorderly office is a reflection of a disorderly mind. You don't want to deck out the office with chiffon and make it look like a setpiece from The Stepford Wives, but you don't want it to smell like a locker room, either. At the bare minimum, I try to give my office the once-over at least once during winter and summer breaks -- even going so far as to clean things that the cleaning staff misses (like the windows). I've also made use of work study students before, asking them to help me reorder my bookshelves or sort through paperwork.

  
  

• Student Management: I always enjoy meeting with students and discussing course material, their lives, and even just shooting the breeze. But sometimes students wear out their welcome or haunt my doorstep. And you can always reposition the furniture or change your hours if you find yourself being pulled into a quagmire of endless student meetings that spill over beyond your regular hours and so forth. There are ways of managing students during office hours without resorting to offensive tactics or pleading cries of overwork. The best way, of course, is to use appointment scheduling effectively. Make appointments that have time limits in advance. Sometimes, you can line up these appointments, too, so that the student feels the weight of the people lining up outside the door. Another strategy is to end the consultation just as one would end a committee meeting when the hour is up: wind up the conversation by summarizing the key issues, and then breaking out the calendar and asking the student to schedule a follow-up to discuss them. Give them an "out" if they don't want to continue talking. You can also just start using phrases like "Next time we meet, we'll discuss X" or "Journal about that topic and let me read your thoughts when I grade it later on." Highlight the larger context of the conversation, as part of a larger process of learning. Sometimes you have to be firm. Set ground rules for any follow-up meeting: "Next time we talk, bring your textbook with specific questions about the reading."
  

Not every "tip" above will work for you and perhaps some would totally backfire and make more work. I know that there's a trade-off we make when we open ourselves up to extra office visits. It's more work, for one thing. And there often comes a point where students begin to treat their teachers like personal therapists, father/mother figures, or best buddies -- blurring the boundaries of professionalism and confusing the student's role as learner with some other role.

But sometimes the openness can pay off in other ways. Some students work harder to get an "A"; students write better evaluations; students are more openly engaged in class discussions. Some have been kind enough to bring me coffee or other treats, though I typically don't invite that. I've had students come to me to discuss --- gasp! -- independent research in literary theory and to talk about readings we didn't get to discuss openly in class. And when I'm sitting in my office, talking with a student about issues for their own sake, or to help the student with something they want to learn just because they want to learn it -- rather than just for the sake of a grade -- then that's when I know I'm doing office hours right.

Hmm.... I might develop this into an article some day. Post your own tips here, by clicking on "comments" below, if you like!

As I watched Primetime Thursday's special on the "Cheating Crisis" last night, I felt the full range of familiar emotions: frustration with students who don't realize that they're only cheating themselves out of learning experiences, anger at the audacity of students who proudly plagiarise, vindication when the students who in the early segments were claiming ethical high ground were confronted with their own cheating by a surprise 'trap' that a teacher sprung on them... I even felt I could identify, in a strange way, with the freelance writer who writes papers for students as a fulltime job, for twenty bucks a page...

I already knew about a lot of these problems, but I kept wondering: so what's the solution? I've read a lot about what teachers can do to better police their classes and prevent cheating in the first place; I've also heard the arguments that the change really needs to come in the students themselves, who need to value ethical behavior. And I realize that this is a cultural issue whose origin lies in multiple cloudy areas, ranging from TV news reportage of big business cheaters (like Enron) to the ease of text manipulation in cyberspace. But Primetime made it clear that the problem is worsening and that it may very well be a "crisis" in the educational system as a whole. If the problem is systemic and out of control, I'm wondering what academic institutions can do to help save us from the "crisis"?

One solution that seemed to leap out at me is instituting smaller student-teacher ratios. The more intimate teachers can become with their students, the less likely they'll try to sneak a peek at a graphics calculator or videophone. Cattle herding students through huge lectures halls generates the anonymity that allows and encourages cheating. This should be obvious, but it's more cost effective to some institutions to have large lectures with grad student recitations/discussion sections than otherwise. A lecture hall reduces the number of faculty necessary, the number of classrooms needed to schedule, and so on. It will take institutions really caring about this problem enough to cap classes at a reasonable level and do what it takes to reduce the student-teacher ratio, even if it means losing money.

Another solution might be to ban some technologies from the classroom...but I don't mean to get rid of them. The trick might be to prohibit student-owned storage and transmittal devices and instead to substitute them with technology that the institution provides. To actually have non-networked computers already at the desks or calculators that are distributed by the teacher for the purposes of working the texts. Technology should be used as a tool, but one that enhances learning. As with many technologies, using it for its own sake seems to become part of the pleasure of cheating with electronic gizmos -- it's "fun" to IM a friend in class...and only one step away from passing quiz answers.

I'm still a proponent of turnitin.com, though I realize that students can subvert it, that there are copyright issues still being debated, and that it is not a magic solution to the problem of plagiarism. Education is what will solve it. But I do still think turnitin.com is a good idea for now. I simply think it arms teachers with technology to fight cheating technology; like giving an anti-aircraft gun to a country without an air force, institutions can arm those teachers who are unsavvy about plagiarism and technology. It can also make some students think twice.

And finally, I think institutions need to have a "zero tolerance policy" for cheating. At one point, the "plagiarist for hire" in the program mentioned that when he writes an A paper, everybody wins: the student gets his A, his parents are pleased that their boy is succeeding, the teacher feels like they've done their job, and the institution doesn't lose a student. The institution needs to be willing to risk losing a student in order to gain a reputation for being academically sound. I think a zero tolerance policy would actually attract good students who want to reap the rewards of doing their own work -- in a classroom where there's an even playing field -- and that parents, too, would prefer to send their children to such a place.

I'm not sure what changes can be done in high schools to help students see the value of working for the sake of learning, rather than cheating for the sake of the grade (or for the sake of time management, or a host of other reasons...). But I do wonder if the emphasis on assessment in the "No Child Left Behind" era is a contributing factor to all of this. I have no basis to make such a claim; just a sense of uncertainty....but as a teacher of Freshman Composition, I will be confronting the products of today's high school head on, and do my best to at least talk about this issue and help my students see the value of learning for its own sake.

Yesterday, each of our graduating English majors presented their "showcase" portfolios to a pair of English faculty, giving a ten minute speech followed by a question & answer period. Instead of an exit exam, we ask students to reflect on how they have met the objectives of the English major in a 6-10 page paper and to talk about where they're going and where they've been, using the portfolio to illustrate and support their claims about their own learning.

We've only been doing this for two or three years now, but I've found it a rewarding process for both student and teacher. Some students get stressed about having to "defend" their work, but the students with the best attitudes approach it as a sort of celebration of their learning. It's thrilling for me to see how far the students have come over four years -- I'm always awe-struck on some level by how quickly they mature and it's renewing to see that I've made a positive impact -- no matter how small -- on the student's thinking. In fact, I think of these moments as not only a way for the student to reflect positively on their development, but also as a means by which we can gauge the effectiveness of our English program.

I've always been a proponent of the "electronic portfolio" option, which allows students to assemble their work online in the form of a webpage, rather than a binder brimming with papers. Only a few students have taken us up on this option. Donna Hibbs was the first, and her's was a great model for others to follow. This year we had only three e-portfolios and the remainder of our graduating English majors chose to submit their portfolio on paper. I only worked with Julie Young's portfolio, which I thought was outstanding -- she did a great job and I admire her skill in web design and data organization, on top of all her talents as an English major.

Nevertheless, I was thinking about some of the cons of electronic portfolios as assessment tools or educational technologies, even as I was grading them side-by-side with paper portfolios. I thought I'd write about these problems here.

Revision
Young entitled her portfolio "Revision" -- and I know from working with her just how much energy she pours into rewriting. And though I didn't mention this to her (and didn't hold it against her), I found her title very ironic, because it called my attention to the fact that e-portfolios give no sense of the process of revision. They rarely contain work that includes commentary from teachers or peer reviewers; there's no sense of process attached to the writing; in fact, there's no way, really, to tell if the papers in an online portfolio are the same ones that produced the grade in the course or whether or not the student revised the paper before putting it online. Does it matter? Maybe not. But I think the feedback that writers get from others (students, teachers, editors) can and should be part of the reflective process as the student uses the portfolio to assess their own growth. Often it's the commentary that "teaches" and so if a student reflects on their learning, they would want to reflect on that material.

I think students harbor the belief that 'clean' copy is good copy, so uploading the MS Word file that they printed their paper from only serves to erase the comments that otherwise were intended to help the student revise or re-see their work from another perspective. Thus, the e-portfolio serves -- in an odd way -- to privilege product over process. Granted, a 'showcase' portfolio at the end of a student's career at a college inherently does this. But the idea of the portfolio -- and of most writing courses -- is to help students see writing (and learning) as a process...and a portfolio, ultimately, should be that: a work-in-process rather than a closed book. Even our Q&A sessions often felt more like advising sessions than exercises in probing into what a student did or did not learn.

One solution for this might be to ask students to include links to earlier drafts or scans of commented papers in .pdf format or some sort of reflection essay on their revision process.

Document Issues
E-portfolios are somewhat clumsy when students upload (at best) .rtf files or Word documents or huge scans of images or .pdf files. Even when they put their work into hypertext, often there's so much of it that students don't recode everything but simply "save as" .html in their word processor, causing innumerable changes in format. If I were working on an e-portfolio, I'd probably 'save as" html and then re-edit -- by hand -- every paper, to make it look something like the work I've done on the sample essays from Paradoxa. It takes a lot of time and a little know-how that not every student has. And unless they're blogging everything or writing every paper in html from scratch, the juggling of different document formats is a lot of trouble for the student and his or her audience online.

Perhaps this issue could be solved by distributing standardizing guidelines for format, but then this risks streamlining out the creativity and personality that an e-portfolio could harbor.

Permanence
If a school provides web space for e-portfolios, then they're doing themselves a favor because the option most students would take otherwise would be to upload their files to some "free" website service which not only forces pop-up and banner advertising, but also might have some questionable terms of service that would -- in effect -- hand all publishing rights over to the web provider. But by the same token, how long is a school required to host a student's portfolio online? Should the student be allowed to showcase their work to future employers...and will they have rights to edit those files long after graduation? I'd think they should, since I see these portfolios as works-in-progress that don't magically "end" just because a student has received a diploma. But there are economic and spatial issues that might prevent this from occurring in an ideal fashion. Just as students who use their school e-mail accounts encounter issues with staying in contact once they graduate, there are similar problems that could occur post-graduation.

There are potential problems, moreover, for both the institution and the student, because of the very nature of publication. What if a paper in the portfolio is plagiarized by a student (after all, uploaded files in .rtf format make this a snap!)? While a great portfolio makes our institution look good, what does a poor portfolio do? What if the student adds a very personal paper written in freshman composition that embarrasses the student five years later? Because essays that are written for teachers often are written in a sort of "safe harbor" (which publication on the web is not), then what happens when a student uploads documents they wrote under the assumption that they were private? Virtually all the potential problems that are associated with student writing online threaten the portfolio process.

Perhaps CDs are a better way to go.

Shifting the Burden of Office Supplies
Okay, so this is a minor point, but over the past five years I have seen a dramatic increase in the number of pages I've had to print on behalf of my students. With an electronic portfolio, it increases tenfold. I have to ask myself: do I want to strain my eyes for another few hours reading on screen, or do I want to print these pages out to refer to later or even bring with me to the portfolio defence. Naturally, I'll read on screen. But you can bet that I'm going to skim more quickly and "surf" rather than "read" in some cases. I'm not convinced yet that that's the best way to assess a student's career.

Students could be asked to provide hard copy of any new paper (like the introductory essay we ask them to write).

Complicating the Presentation
Although students can utilize our smart classrooms at Seton Hill and project their e-portfolio onto a wall, few actually click through different pages, showing and telling. Instead, they present a talk. And frankly, I think I prefer it that way. If a student went page by page through their bound portfolio, I'd be tempted not to pass them because they would seem under-prepared or disorganized. Similarly, a student could hide behind their e-portfolio as a sort of shield from public speaking, the way some people poorly use PowerPoint. The portfolio is something the group can turn to during the presentation/defense, but doesn't necessarily need to.

Well, I'm sure there are more problems -- and MANY more benefits that I've bracketed off for now for the sake of focusing on this issue. Hopefully, I'll take these ideas back to my colleagues and talk about ways that we can improve the system. Naturally, if a student wants to work in the electronic media, such as students in our New Media Journalism program, then an e-portfolio makes a lot of sense. But for now, the students who do use electronic portfolios are paving the way to standards and realizing the pros and cons of this method through the risks they take. So far, I've been very pleased with the work they've done.

• "The sure mark of an A paper is that you will find yourself telling someone else about it." -- Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning

  
  

• "...an A+ is a touchdown that got the crowd to its feet -- a forty-yard pass play or a seventy-yard run from scrimmage. As color commentators like to put it, so and so 'took it to the house.'" -- Sanford Pinsker, Irascible Professor

  
  

• "An A paper is written with verve and clarity. It displays a curiosity, a control of knowledge beyond what was covered in class, an original insight or an extrapolation beyond class work." -- John Lye, Brock Univeristy CPCF Handbook

  
  

• "An "A" essay is excellent work that a student should be proud of." -- Elvira Casal, MTSU

  
  

• "All it takes is a well written introduction, body and conclusion. These steps are a lot easier than most people make them out to be." -- "How to Write an A Essay" reproduced at the following plagiarism sites: NetEssays.com, MegaEssays.com, RadEssays.com, VirtualEssays.com, NeedFreeEssays.com, FindFreeEssays.com, etc.

  
  

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Student: "Do you grade on a curve?"
Professor: "No, a flat surface. Usually my desk." -- Dr. Spence, WSU, cited on ProfQuotes.com

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"...the fixation on grades so prevalent in our times might have to do with a paradigm shift. Perhaps the ideal of the sage or expert instructing the receptive student/apprentice has been replaced subtly by a new model: the paid coach and his/her trainees. In the latter relationship, the older coach is hired to make sure that the younger competitor brings home "the medals." By analogy, it becomes the job of the professor to make sure that the students bring home the "A's" -- Ronda Chervin, Idol worship of the 'A'