Do grades motivate students? The answer is yes, but it’s not an unqualified yes. Below are highlights from a couple of first-rate studies that illustrate those qualifications, and they aren’t the only studies to do so.
The article cited below describes an assignment in an upper-division, large-lecture biochemistry course that has students generate questions about the readings. The assignment is worth about 5 percent of the course grade. The goal was to develop a formative assessment strategy that “would successfully (1)
With the academic year nearly over and final exams upon us, it’s a good time to consider how we assess student knowledge in our courses. Cumulative finals are still used in many courses, but a significant number of faculty have backed away from them because
In “Calculating Final Course Grades: What About Dropping Scores or Offering a Replacement?” (The Teaching Professor March 2014), the editor notes that “some students … assume that course content is a breeze, [so] the first exam serve[s] as a wake-up call.” (p. 6) In two
Having students write their own exams is an interesting idea that arose out of the authors’ desires to increase student involvement in learning and self-evaluation, minimize cheating, decrease exam stress, and make exam experiences more meaningful, among other goals. It’s an approach that can be
There are three articles in this issue that deal with student assessment and learning. One offers an interesting approach that has students writing and answering their own exam questions; another introduces the idea of feedforward, which provides feedback before rather than after learning; and a
There is growing interest in the pedagogical literature in something called feedforward. It is, as the name implies, the opposite of feedback, which provides input after the fact. Feedforward offers input focused on the future. It lets students know what they should be doing or
The rethinking of feedback as proposed by Boud and Molloy in an article referenced here involves something called “sustainable assessment,” and its overarching goal is equipping students to be lifelong learners.
Is this situation at all like what you’re experiencing? Class sizes are steadily increasing, students need more opportunities to practice critical thinking skills, and you need to keep the amount of time devoted to grading under control. That was the situation facing a group of
In a small study undertaken in three sections of intermediate macroeconomic theory, MacDermott compared three assessment policies in terms of their impact on the cumulative final exam score: 1) three in-class exams each worth 20 percent of the grade; 2) three in-class exams with the
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