Three teaching things: week of May 23
This week: one year of the newsletter! And: a paper that explores the impact of grading on student motivation; a blog post on how to build student engagement; and a tool to keep you organized.
Issue #48
First, a milestone
This issue marks the newsletter’s one year anniversary! At this time last year I decided that I was seeing so many great resources to support pandemic-imposed teaching that I was afraid the best were getting lost. Email newsletters, published using a platform like Substack, weren’t quite having their moment yet but I was interested in exploring newsletters’ possibility as a kind of professional development tool. So, Three Teaching Things was born.
And a year has passed. 48 issues published (came short of 52 by taking a two-week break in the summer, and a two week break over the winter holidays).
Writing the newsletter has been an enjoyable weekend ritual over the last year. The format has largely remained the same since the first issue, but it’s harder now to find a tool to share each week, so I’ve stopped strictly following the one paper, one resource & one tool formula. The most significant change took place in issue 16, which saw the introduction of the newsletter’s fancy logo, and a shift to a new publishing platform.
Eight months ago, the newsletter had 92 subscribers, today it has 171. The newsletter gets around 250 views per issue. I’m not really sure what success looks like with this project, but I plan to take a break over the summer and re-assess. In the meantime thanks for joining me for a portion of the last year, and, as always thank-you for reading!
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1. The impact of grades on student motivation
All courses don’t need to end with a letter grade, and this paper reports on the impact of three different grading systems:
a traditional system, where a grade (e.g. letter or number) is “given” at the end of course (given is in air quotes because I hate the idea that instructors give grades, but this is an aside);
a system where student can elect to receive a pass/fail evaluation at the end of the course; and
the final system where student receive no letter, number or pass/fail but a narrative evaluation.
To unpack that last system a bit more, a narrative evaluation system includes “…feedback for assessment tasks and comments on whether the student met the goals of the course” (p. 4) and “also include more holistic and personalized comments on changes in observed academic skills, attitudes or ‘soft-skills’ such as team-work over the duration of the course” (p. 4).
The paper interviewed students at three different Universities that used these different grading systems, and students at the same three Universities completed an online survey that consisted of a 28-item Academic Motivation Scale and a 13-item Learning Self-Regulation Questionnaire.
This particular study found that students at the Universities with alternative assessment methods “…exemplified the ‘high-quality’ academic motivation, with high autonomous motivation and low controlled motivation that is predictive of optimal learning” (p. 11). At the University with traditional grading, “…motivational profiles with higher extrinsic motivations that are more like high achieving school pupils” (p. 11).
The whole discussion section is worth a read, but I was struck by this conclusion: “…our results also suggested that grades can adversely affect learning by distracting students from deeper personal reflection on academic content towards more superficial details” (p. 12) which suggests, in fact, that a traditional grading system could be used to enhance student performance in courses where assessments like rote memorization builds foundational knowledge (p. 12).
My takeaway? No single grading system is best for all learning settings.
Chamberlin, K., Yasué, M., & Chiang, I.-C. A. (2018). The impact of grades on student motivation. Active Learning in Higher Education, 9(1), 146978741881972–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469787418819728
2. Unpacking “engagement” in the classroom
“I want to create an engaging learning experience for students.”
I know that I’ve uttered these words when thinking broadly about my classroom aims. But…just what do I mean by engagement, and how can the decisions I make as an instructor help build engaging learning experiences?
This blog post by Dr. Celia Evans and Vivienne Liu from Cornell University’s (Ithaca, USA) College of Engineering does what it promises to: turns to the research literature to unpack just what we mean when we talk student engagement, and closes with recommendations to bring to classrooms to build that engagement.
3. Trello
Going meta, I use Trello (Free, $$) as the way I collect and track all the resources I’ve shared in the newsletter. This isn’t strictly a tool to help with classroom instruction, but is a tool you could explore to help you plan multiple aspects of your work.
You can see in the screenshot below that I have four columns in the Trello board that I use for the newsletter: one for each category of items. Every possible item gets added as a card in it’s appropriate column, and when published each card gets dragged over to the publish column and the issue is added. I won’t go into more detail here, but I’ll note that each card can be “turned over” where lots of additional detail can be added.
In my daily work life in faculty development, I use Trello with colleagues to track meeting agenda items, including helping with follow-up; managing incoming requests from faculty (see this post by my colleague Dr. Beth Hundey that explains more); and unit-wide projects.
Three Teaching Things is a weekly newsletter compiled by Gavan Watson, which shares three different teaching and learning resources (papers, resources or tools) worth your attention.
These are great resources Gavan thank you for making these a reality