NUTS & BOLTS

 An assessment newsletter serving Springfield College and Benedictine University

June 2007 · Vol. 7 No. 10

Class discussion, side journey to 'Rubric's Cube'

At the end of spring semester, I got an email from adjunct instructor Donn Stephens. "I'd like to ask you to take a side journey just for a moment," he began. "I'm always trying to assess how I grade my students. One of the areas is weekly class participation." Well, that didn't sound like a side issue to me. Assessment is what this newsletter is all about, and class participation is an issue we all wrestle with. So I decided to do this month's issue about it.  

"I'm trying to get some input from others who teach at the college level," Donn continued. "When you grade/evaluate your students, do you have a component for class participation? Or do you give any grades for their attendance and participation in a particular class?"

I wrote back saying I put a lot of stress on class participation and outlining a couple of things I do in my classes. They involve posting to blogs (interactive Web logs) I maintain. And I added a general thought about how I like in-class journaling (which is what I call ungraded writing) because I think "there are some kids who sit there looking intelligent, following the conversation [during whole-class discussion] but don't want to be glib and don't speak up ... and I don't want to penalize them."

That was pretty idiosyncratic, though, so I also sent Donn a discussion rubric (or grading checklist) that Joanna Tweedy prepared for our Resource Center at SCI/Benedictine. And I want to throw the discussion open to other faculty. Let's start with Donn's questions. I'll just relay them, with a couple of my own, and ask you to email your answers to me at <pellertsen@sci.edu>.

Do you grade on class participation? If so, how do you do it? How do you weight it in the final grade? How do you get the kids to look out from under their ballcaps and take part in class? How do you get a whole-class discussion going? What alternatives do you have to whole-class discussion? How do you assess your performance as a discussion leader/facilitator?

I hope we can continue the conversation in future issues of Nuts & Bolts.

In the meantime, I liked Joanna's class discussion rubric. It's available in the Resource Center. And, unlike so many other rubrics I've seen, it's written with students in mind. It allows students to be evaluated in three areas -- content, language use and "reflection, critical thinking and interaction." It allows five grade levels, from "Exceptional/A" and "Good/B" to "Could Be Better/C," "Needs Improvement/D" and "You're Better than This" with no letter grade following. See? I said Joanna wrote it with students in mind. Each of the three evaluation areas has detailed criteria, again written so students will relate to it.

Here, for example, are the criteria for detailed observation under critical thinking and interaction. First, for an A student:

And here are the criteria for the students in the "Better than This" category whose letter grade Joanna was too tactful to mention:

I can't recall that any of my students have physically regurgitated in class, although quite a few have looked like they wanted to on Monday mornings. But I've had a lot of them parrot back information in a monotone. So I like the way the criteria are worded, and I think my students do, too. They're not written in the abstractions we parrot back to outside stakeholders.

RUBRICS ARE A VERY GOOD WAY of keeping on track. I don't use them as much as I should in my classes, but a lot of experienced teachers swear by them and beginners find them a lifeline. Rich Slatta, a history professor at North Carolina State University, defines a rubric as "a set of clear standards that [1] informs students of expectations for an assignment and [2] provides the teacher with a fair, consistent set of criteria for assessing performance on the assignment." Slatta, who has also written about cowboys for the Oklahoma, Nebraska, Texas A&M and Yale university presses, as well as Cowboys and Indians, Persimmon Hill and Roundup magazines, has a website called Rubric's Cube on North Carolina State's website. 

Slatta says we should use rubrics so our students know where we're coming from. I call it accountability and transparency, but I read too many educational blogs and journals. Latta calls it "coming clean." He explains:

Too much important stuff takes place in a black box. Professors perform magic tricks that dazzle students with "woo-woo-woo" and arcane knowledge. However, what about showing them where the magic comes from? What about learning how to evaluate good magic from bad? Rubrics make clear how a discipline or a specific instructor evaluates the quality and presentation of analysis and information.

There's more to it than "woo-woo-woo." Coming clean about our standards and criteria by using a rubric lends an extra element of consistency, fairness and discipline to our classes. "By highlighting student performance strengths and weakness on behavioral criteria," Slatta adds, "we can better teach students how to improve in the future." Rubrics can also help us improve our own teaching in the future. At Springfield College/Benedictine, we stress a linkage between what happens in the classroom and our stated mission. And rubrics can help us do that. Slatta explains:

By tying rubrics to both general course objectives and specific assignment requirements, we cerate a more logical, intelligible, cohesive learning environment. Students see and understand the big picture, specific activities, and how the two fit together.
And so do we as teachers.

More politicking on higher ed

Fasten your seatbelts. Congress, educators and the U.S. Department of Education are getting into a three- or four-way tangle over Education Department efforts to force regional accrediting bodies, including the North Central Association, to require more "bright line" assessment of higher education. The upshot, whichever way it turns out, is likely to be more political pressure on college and university teachers.

Here are the most recent developments:

Education Department talks. under the Department's "negotiated rule-making" procedure adjourned early this month without reaching agreement on the Department's demand that colleges and universities test for national "bright-line" minimum standards, among other things. Explains Doug Lederman of Inside Higher Ed newsletter:

Over the months of discussion and debate during several meetings of the negotiating panel, the members reached agreement on various relatively minor issues, but remained divided about the three most significant items on the committee’s agenda: (1) ways to prod accreditors to force colleges to measure and report more quantitative data about their success in educating students; (2) a proposal to insist that accreditors ensure that the institutions they oversee do not have policies that automatically reject the academic credits of students who transfer from colleges approved by national accreditors; (3) a set of possible changes in the department’s process for granting recognition to accrediting agencies, which has come under fire as its standards for judging accreditors have appeared in recent months to shift inappropriately with the political winds.
When the talks adjourned without agreement, Lederman adds, it left the Department free to "issue proposed regulations that say more or less whatever its officials want — because no consensus was reached, they are not bound by the results of the rule making process, even on the issues on which the negotiators agreed."

Congressional opposition. At the same time, a U.S. House subcommittee adopted language warning the Education Department against "using any of its funds to 'promulgate, implement or enforce' new federal regulations related to accreditation." But for complex parliamentary reasons, the vote was mostly symbolic. Also weighing in on the issue was U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a former University of Tennessee president who, for his own reasons, last month came out against what he sees as excessive federal regulation of higher ed. Lederman says the committee vote and Alexander's comments, delivered on the Senate floor, "signal increasing opposition in Congress to the department’s recent efforts to push improvements in higher education in part through the government’s role in overseeing accreditation." How much impact the current jockeying will have remains to be seen.

Nuts &  Bolts is an electronic newsletter published by SCI's Assessment Committee. Members are: Bob Blankenberger, Brian Carrigan, Dave Holland, Barb Tanzyus and Pete Ellertsen (chair). Kevin Broeckling, dean of students; and John Cicero, academic affairs dean, serve ex officio. If you have information, comments or feedback, please contact any committee member or Nuts & Bolts editor Pete Ellertsen, in 211 Beata Hall on the SCI/Benedictine campus, 525-1420 ext. 519 or by e-mail at <pellertsen@sci.edu>.