Low-Stakes Assignments for Grading

Did you ever have a dream where you were back in school, you enter a class, and you realize you have a final exam on a topic that you have no idea what it is?  The pressure of exams is so great that it unconsciously affects us decades later.  In fact, high-stakes assignments and testing have been linking to increasing suicidal ideations (Wang, 2016), and higher suicide rates (Kapur, 2021; Singer, 2017). They have been connected to undermining educational goals, perpetrating inequalities, crating unequitable learning environments, and encouraging cheating both from students and educational actors, such as teachers, administrators, and even state officials (Nicols & Berliner, 2007). So then, why do we use high-stakes testing and assignments?  Tradition?

 

Low-stakes assignments when taken individually do not significantly impact a students’ grades. Their purpose is primarily to provide students with a performance indicator.  Students can then reflect on the areas in need of improvement and how to improve. The low-stakes assignment also provides assistive scaffolding by providing regular formative feedback that is frequent and timely (Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, & Whitt, 2010). They work best when providing formative feedback, starting and continuing throughout the course.

 

Benefits of Low-Stakes Assignments

A few of the benefits of low-stakes assignments include:

• They provide feedback for instructors about how successful students are learning. This can be particularly effective in environments where it is hard to pick up on subtle clues of students struggling, such as in online or hybrid classes.
• Allowing instructors to direct students to resources if they need further assistance or support
• Early feedback opens up communication between students and their instructors, possibly increasing their likeliness to seek help when needed
• Allowing students to be active participants in the evaluation of their own learning
• Encouraging students and increasing the likelihood of their engagement and attendance

Many of these will rise your retention rates and help students succeed.

 

Examples of Low-Stakes Assignments

But what would a low-stakes assignment look like? Some examples of low-stakes assignments include:

•  Self-tests. (ungraded or low-points). These can even be automated with online testing so that it does not take any time in the classroom.  These can also be anonymized to give students comfort. Self-tests are particularly effective when combined with having…
• Multiple attempts (on questions or whole exam). This feature reduces test-anxiety and allows students to learn from their errors.  When feedback is given for each question, you will notice the best results. The knowledge of that they can take the exam another time also reduces the pressure to cheat (Wehlburg, 2021).
• Discussion/Collaboration: Students sharing their writing or thoughts with others and get feedback will assist their learning and meeting learning outcomes
• Multiple submissions of a paper. Feedback from a first submission with time to reflect and rewrite their paper allows students to hone their writing skills.  
• Reflective journaling. Writing self-reflective content both increases one’s meta-cognitive skills used for learning as well as better develops writing skills.  An added perk is that AI tools have a hard time replicating this type of writing as well.
•  A Threaded Assignment i.e., breaking down the assignment into several parts.  Individually, the grades or low, but collaboratively the project aggregates to a large assignment, such as a term paper. This technique often proves the scaffolds that help disenfranchised, or otherwise struggling, students succeed. A sample of deconstructing a large assignment into components would be making a thesis paper into the following smaller assignments:

• Thesis/Abstract
• Outline
• Annotated bibliography
•  1st draft
• Final draft

These are just a few examples; however, they offer an excellent opportunity for both you and your students to get needed feedback to help improve your course’s student success rate. These also help develop a grading system that can clearly show the steps necessary for mastering the meeting the learning outcomes of the course. 

References

Bayraktar, B (2021) Tip: Many Low Stakes Assignments. Tips for Teaching Professors, Apr 6.

Drabick D. A. G., Weisberg R., Paul L., Bubier J. L. (2007). Keeping it short and sweet: Brief, ungraded writing assignments facilitate learning. Teaching of Psychology, 34, 172–176.

Greenhalgh, S. (2016) The Hidden Cost of Asia’s High Test Scores. The Diplomat. Dec 9

Hale, M. (2018) Thwarting Plagiarism in the Humanities Classroom: Storyboards, Scaffolding, and a Death Fair. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, v18 n4 p86-110 Dec.

Kapur, M (2021) Student suicides put a spotlight on high-pressure exams during India’s pandemic. Quartz. Sept 17.

Kuh, G. D., Kinzie, J., Schuh, J.S., and Whitt, E.J. (2010). Student success in college: Creating conditions that matter. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Nicols, S. and D. Berliner (2007) Collateral Damage: how High-States Testing Corrupts America’s Schools. Harvard Education Press, Cambridge, MA.

Mintz, S (2023) 10 Ways to Prevent Cheating. Inside Higher Ed. February 16.

Singer, S (2017) Middle School Suicides Double as Common Core Testing Intensifies. Huffington Post. Aug 2.

Wang, Liang. (2016). The effect of high-stakes testing on suicidal ideation of teenagers with reference-dependent preferences. Journal of Population Economics. 29.

Warnock, Scott. (2013). Frequent, low-stakes grading: Assessment for communication, confidence. Faculty Focus. Madison, WI: Magna Publications. 

Wehlburg, K (2021) Assessment design that supports authentic learning (and discourages cheating) Times Higher Education. Nov 24.

Using Intelligent Agents and Gamification for Professional Development

 

Most every college online learning department in the US sparsely staffed given the tasks they is expected of them. While faculty are experts in their field of study, instructional design is separate field and it cannot be assumed that all faculty have this training.  This knowledge is critical for the professional development of the faculty and directly affects the accessibility of online course content as well as adopting best practices in teaching and learning, such as regularly reviewing online courses quality.  This become an added burden for understaffed department. Nevertheless, these are necessary are for meeting Middle States Accreditation (Standard III, section 4). 

To make this task tractable, a school using a LMS such as Brightspace, can create a non-termed ‘course’ where faculty can both learn what it is like to be a student in the system and participate in a self-paced training to improve the understanding of necessary topics.  By creating a communal professional development space, faculty can autonomous select topics to improve and break down silo’s with strategic online forums. The shared space can also act as repository of tools and OER content that faculty can easily access.

 In the case of SUNY Schenectady, a 5 module self-paced course allowed faculty to select between modules the content they wanted to first focus on.  In order to progress, certain requirements were necessary to advance further in the course.  This allowed modules to provide scaffolded activities.  The modules also provided a quantifiable space that required about the same about of effort to complete while each module illustrated Universal Design for Learning principles in an attempt to teach by example.

The true challenge to professional development is getting faculty to participate in the training.  To do this we had three incentives:

1. Learning outcomes for each module included building assets that the faculty could use in their courses.  Often these assets employed strategies that would increase student engagement and reduce faculty effort. 
2. Gamified modules offered badges for completing sections.   By design it encouraged or lead learners to produce more or complete the course
3. Certificates – were set up through an automated system (Awards).  Faculty would received personalized and dated certificates for not only completing the courses, but for completing each module.   This would allow for learners to use their work in each module to generate measured evidence (a certificate).  These illustrate a quantifiable amount of work  and the learners can share the certificates with their supervisors as evidence of the professional development in the annual review. For those without Adobe PDF Pro, a generic certificate can also work,
   
   

Automated Enrollment

Using Intelligent Agents in Brightspace, the system can identify all those with a specific roll, such as Faculty, and enroll them into a class.  With a little forethought, the school can enroll all employees in a “Staff” role that can be upgraded to “Faculty” if they teach.  This will allow all members of school to have access to the training area to promote topics with ubiquitous applications, such as “Accessibility”.  With the two roles, an Intelligent Agent can easily enroll all those working at the campus.   Naturally, this can be expanded with new modules and even become a single place for the school’s professional development

Principle of Engagement - Guideline 3 - Criterion 3

 

Universal Design for Learning

Principle of Engagement - Guideline 3 - Criterion 3

When developing a course using the third principle of Universal Design for Learning, there are three specific guidelines to assist us.  The third, Self-Regulation addresses maintaining focus and determination.

Criterion 3 of this guideline advocates that we develop self-assessment and reflection

Learners need to monitor their emotions and reactions accurately in order to develop their ability at self-regulation. The propensity and capacity for metacognition will vary greatly among learners.  As an instructor you should not be surprised to have students who may require considerable amounts of explicit instruction and modeling before they can self-assess effectively.  For some, merely recognizing that they are making progress can be highly motivating.  However, others may need more.  The inability to recognize one’s own progress can be a key demotivating factor.  Having multiple models and scaffolds of a variety of self-assessment techniques is important so learners can select the ones that will work best for themselves. This will increase learners’ awareness of their progress and how they may learn from their mistakes. The latter is critical, as recognizing errors as educational opportunities is critical for accelerating growth and success.  

Some strategies to meet this criterion include:

• Providing tools to chart or display data that marks improvement to assist learners to modify strategies that will aid in this success
• Providing ample activities that offer timely feedback that better frames the learners' progress
• Developing assignments that supply feedback and allow learners to reflect on the feedback and adapt new strategies based on their reflection.
• Supplying a developed gradebook, or center, where learners can view their progress relative to the course and have access to detailed feedback.  (When using any learning management system, such as Blackboard or Moodle, this is relatively easy because the feedback areas are already linked to the grade center)

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

Principle of Engagement - Guideline 3 - Criterion 2

 

Universal Design for Learning

Principle of Engagement - Guideline 3 - Criterion 2

When developing a course using the third principle of Universal Design for Learning, there are three specific guidelines to assist us.  The third, Self-Regulation addresses maintaining focus and determination.

Criterion 2 of this guideline advocates that we facilitate personal coping skills and strategies.

Most learners will require more than just a model of self-regulatory skills. Scaffolding and sustained apprenticeships, possibly with mentors, contribute to the development of these strategies. Employing reminders, checklists, and process models can assist learners in adopting an adaptive strategy for managing their response to external events, such as social settings that may produce anxiety. This also applies to responses to internal events, such as for decreasing depression from facing the workload.

 
These strategies should offer flexible options to account for the individual variation in learners and accommodate the differences that variation brings. With these strategies, learners will be able to manage healthy responses to the stress of learning and possible setbacks, and eventually overcome these setbacks.

When addressing this, consider developing or providing scaffolds and feedback for:

• Managing frustration in not meeting goals or succeeding in tasks
• Seeking external support (does your campus have external services or could you embed them into your learning environment?)
• Developing coping controls to stress and setbacks
• Implementing exemplars to demonstrate effective coping skills
• Dispelling antiquated tropes about aptitude instead of viewing learning as improving (For example adopting the mindset of “How do I get better at Statistics?” instead of “I am not good at math”)

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

Accessibility Checkers

Creating accessible content is easier now than ever before.  While there are several rules to learn and standards are regularly changing, such as WCAG standards, creating accessible content does not require a specialist. There are plenty of tools to assist you.  Most applications have accessibility checkers build right in.   These make producing accessible content easy.

We commonly make spell checking or grammar checking part of the process in creating a document.  Now it is time to include accessibility checking. 
 

You may notice that with so many accessibility checkers, sometimes they may differ in their analysis. Why should we pay attention to them?  Remember that accessibility standards are changing – they are evolving and regularly improving.  Algorithms can vary between programs and are trying to keep up.  The best course of action is to rely on any and all tools at your disposal.  This way you can work at having the most accessible content as possible.

Schools that take accessibility seriously should have at least three accessibility checkers at your disposal.

Available Accessibility Checkers

MS Word (or MS Office Apps)

Depending on the version, the accessibility checker can be in different locations.  It is most commonly on the “review ribbon”, but earlier versions have it under File.  Be sure to use it whenever you create a word document.

  

Ally

Those gauges next to content indicate the accessibility rating.  

Be sure to click on it and see why it is not dark green (or 100% accessible).  Ally will often direct you on how to improve your content.

Accessibility checker in the LSM HTML Editor

For example:
 Brightspace provide an accessibly checker in their HTML editor in the tools ribbon. The icon looks like an eye with a checkmark next to it. Naturally, if you hover the mouse over the tool buttons, you will see their names pop up. If you select the icon, it will scan the page, identify any issues, and offer advice.

It is important get acquainted with the accessibility checkers and incorporate it in your content creation routine.  It does not take much time to ensure that the content you create is accessible. In fact, the more you use the checkers, you will notice that you will be unconsciously adopting accessible practices when you produce content. This is a skill that will help you and others.