Visual Grade Representation and Assignment Checklist

Two issues often frustrate instructors and contribute to a significant drop in students’ grades.  First, students frequently fail to comprehend the importance an assignment contributes to their final grade and their lack of attention or concern contributes to severely undermining their grade.  Second, students commonly forget to accomplish all of their assignments.  The zero for missing an assignment tanks their grade. 

Instead of being frustrated and accepting that they these are inevitable failings of students, perhaps they are not.  Could the design of our courses be altered to offer scaffolds to assist in reducing the above cases? 

 

Fortunately, there is an OER tool that can provide scaffolds to improve student success.  The Visual Grade Representation and Assignment Checklist is a simple tool that can both better illustrate the ‘weight’ an assignment bears on a final grade as well as assist student planning to ensure they submit all their assignments on time.

 

First, the Visual Grade Representation and Assignment Checklist provides a graphical depiction of the grading. A pie chart shows how much each category contributes to the final grade.  The chart can easily be edited in MS Word and, as an instructor, you can change the type of graph, if it better illustrates the relationship. Simply Right-click and select “edit the data”.  This alternate representation provides another organization method to guide students understanding and their application of meta-strategies.

 

Second, below the pie-chart is a checklist. It reminds students of; which assignments belong to which category, when each assignment is due, the how much it may contribute to the final grade, and a space for students to mark-off completed assignments.  Color coding assists the association of assignments and categories with the above graph while labels ensure color-blind students will not be left behind.  Students can print out the checklist and use it to guide expectations and promote attitudes that help optimize motivation.  This also increases their length on task orientation, which is in line with the Principle of Engagement in the Theory of Universal Design for Learning.

A tool that helps your students succeed and reduces time you spend on reminding students about missed assignments is something every good instructor wants. How much would your pay for this incredible tool?  It doesn’t matter – it is free.  Feel free to download the tool and let’s start improving our student success rates today - https://tinyurl.com/VGRAC

NOTE: If you edit the file in Word and save it as a PDF, the page will be seen inline for all LMSs. You can also encourage students to print out the page and physically mark off assignments when they are submitted.  This act helps reinforce their memory of the remaining assignments. 

Principle of Representation - Guideline 3 - Criterion 4

Universal Design for Learning

Principle of Representation - Guideline 3 - Criterion 4

When developing a course using the first principle of Universal Design for Learning, there are three specific guidelines to assist us. The third, Comprehension focuses on maintaining clarity about the content provided.

Criterion 4 of this guideline advocates that we maximize transfer and generalization so students can apply learning to new contexts.

Each learner varies in the amount of scaffolding necessary for memory and information transfer in order to access prior learning. Offering assistance in how to transfer the information to new situations, accelerates the learning process. Without this ability, the learned information may become inaccessible in new situations. Supports for memory, generalization, and transfer include techniques designed to heighten the memorability of the information can be assisted by:

• Providing checklists, organizers, notes, electronic reminders
• Prompting the use of mnemonic strategies and devices
• Incorporating explicit opportunities for review and practice
• Providing templates, graphic organizers, concept maps to support organizing the information learned
• Scaffolding the content to connect new information to prior knowledge
• Embedding new ideas in familiar ideas and contexts
• Providing explicit, supported opportunities to generalize learning to new situations
• Offer opportunities over time to revisit key ideas and linkages between ideas

By following these suggestions, your course will assist students communicating and expressing their knowledge, as well as being in line the Principle of Representation in the Theory of Universal Design for Learning.

Fall 2021 Teaching and Learning Webinars

 

This Fall, SUNY Schenectady has coordinated a set of webinars to help you improve your teaching, both online and in the classroom.  Topics will include:

• Accessibility is Not Optional
• 5 Easy Pieces: Tips for Improving Online Student Engagement
• Online Labs! Successfully Implementing Science Labs
• Diversity Awareness in the Curriculum and Inclusive Teaching: What can I do as a faculty?
• Making the Most from PowerPoint

The webinars will have a short presentation period and ample time for discussion.  Besides featuring Teaching and Learning Specialist, Dave Wolf, several guest speakers share their expertise. 

The webinars will occur every other Monday, from noon to 1:00PM, starting October 4th. You can download a schedule with more details as well as the links to each webinar.  

The series is open to all educators. 

Why are Synchronous Online Classes Dull?

When asked, students generally feel that they learn most from Asynchronous courses, followed by traditional face-to-face courses, and least by synchronous online courses.  How can this be?

This is in-part because many asynchronous courses rigorously apply instructional design best practices based on years of research.  It is not clear that most traditional course are and probably less likely for synchronous courses given the emergency adoption during the pandemic. We must remember that teaching online involves significantly more than simply dropping a face-to-face course, or Zoom meetings, into the campus learning-management system. Designing effective online courses is hard work and differs significantly from in-person teaching. HyFlex courses essentially braid the two together, which means it is even harder.

 

Before working on an HyFlex course, it is important that you are comfortable teaching asynchronously online. If not, you may underestimate the amount of effort and interaction necessary for engaging students.

With this in mind, why are synchronous online classes dull?

The issue is not that they are intrinsically worse than traditional classes. Instead students are perceiving that they are not learning from them.  It is vital to ask another question:

Are we using the technology correctly?

The online medium is dynamic and listening passively for an hour may not be the best way to promote learning. In fact, the average time a student will watch an instructional video is 6 minutes – regardless if its length is six or sixty minutes.  Clearly, the take home message for the medium is that video alone needs to be in small chunks if we want to foster learner engagement.

 

The traditional sage on the stage model has been abandoned by a significant number of teachers. For example, many teachers flip their classroom. The content is available on online, while the classes meet for a quick review, discussion, learning activities and assignments.

 

This strategy has also been successful in implementing HyFlex.  It is better suited for brief exposition (lessons, review, or instructions) that is recorded followed by breakout sessions for groups.  The class then returns for students to present or follow up information with the instructor.

During the breakout sessions, the instructor can offer more personalized assistance by visiting all groups, virtual or within the classroom.

 

The flipped classroom has a long history of success.  It is not surprising that it also works for HyFlex.  It probably works equally as well for online synchronous courses because this strategy better aligns with the mode of educational delivery.