My post, “Do college students ever read their textbooks” drew a lot of comments from students who revealed that reading textbooks was at the bottom of their priority list. No wonder, the performance of several of my students during the recent midterm exam was dismal. Consider these midterm exam scores: 2/100, 8/100, 9/100, 22/100 and so on. It depressed me as I entered their scores in my course spreadsheet which later yielded seven failing grades.
Students explained that they were not used to my type of exam questions that required recall and application. They said, “What we reviewed flew out of the window the moment we read the exam questions.” Consider these:
Construct a semantic differential scale consisting of at least 5 bipolar indicators to assess audience feedback to the student publication, The Amaranth.
If you were asked to pretest Devcompage (http://devcompage.com), construct an instrument that will measure audience feedback with regard to the first four (4) measures of effectiveness. Emphasize how you will measure the extent to which the content of the blog can be understood.
I was softhearted so I gave a retake midterm exam to those who needed it to pass. I finished marking papers yesterday and they did pass.
If many students today are unable to answer exam questions that require application and analysis, what could be the reason? Is it because they don’t have effective study habits or time management? Is it the competing demands on a student’s time? On TV, there are game shows and telenovelas screaming for attention. The campus Internet cafe beckons students to update their Friendster, Multiply and Facebook accounts, there’s a video to watch on YouTube, and YM or Google chats to respond to. But, besides these usual culprits, other teachers also place undue demands on students’ time with projects that require them to work overtime, into the wee hours of the morning.
Besides exams and hands-on exercises, how else will teachers know that students learned something in their classes? In our class, we had a mock focus group discussion and exercises in cloze procedure, Fog index, Flesch formula and SMOG test. But the midterm exam turned out to be the students’ biggest hurdle.
What are some doable and objective ways to measure your learning that will lead to fair, unbiased grades for everyone in class? Please post your comments.
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September 8, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Efren B. Saz
This question actually poses a big problem for teachers. How does one really measure learning and do grades actually indicate one’s learning from a subject? As a teacher concerned with very fundamental questions like what should students learn from my subject and how best learning could be achieved and measured I sometimes question my own actions and strategies in the classroom. If my students fail to answer because they don’t understand the question and they get a failing grade am I measuring and grading their understanding of the subject matter or their facility of the English language? In our abbreviated syllabus for the GE course that we teach, we include three objectives. One, a field-related goal which is learning about the field of knowledge being taught. Second is critical thinking. This one may not be taught effectively through any classroom strategy but by practice and modelling–the teacher asking the critical questions that sharpens the students’ ability to analyze a phenomenon and point those questions/issues/twists/turns, etc.that matter. Or by giving examples that allow students’ minds to explore using their own curiosity and inquisitiveness and have their own interpretation based on their own conception of the world. Now this is where theory comes in. How is their personal view consistent or divergent from established theory? This is where the field-related goal also comes in. Learning in this instance means he/she understands the world based on his/her own assessment of the facts and learning how the “field” looks at them from the standpoint of the theory and coming out still holding his/her own views because he/she is not convinced of the theory or convinced that the theory is credible. So how is this measured? First, does the student demonstrate critical thinking-his own ability to analyze and make inferences about phenomena. Second, does he know the field’s accepted interpretation (there could be several in the social sciences or even in biology such as Darwin’s vs. the bible’s view of creation). Viewing his own against the science’s theories raises his level of maturity to one of knowing the fundamentals and standing his ground. Expectedly, he becomes a much enlightened person if he is open to other views. If, despite the breadth of his readings and discourse he insists to be parochial the world becomes a dangerous place if a plurality of his kind exists. The teacher should still give the student an A in the course (assuming he did his/her papers and aced the exams) even if he/she deserves to be sent back to the dark ages. In practice, we use field-related matter to ferret out his abilities of analysis and reasoning. However, objective-type tests, especially in a subject taught in the second language (which we do here in the islands of the Flips) will only encourage memorization. What you asked in the midterm appropriately required them to think hard and apply skills. Application is the third of three objectives any course should have: Field-related matters, critical thinking and application of skills. Now if you had six sections of 42 per section and you require these tests without a TA, you deserve a monument in front of your building.