Provide Clarity with Single-Point Rubrics

How much time do you spend putting together rubrics for assignments? If you're like most instructors, a thoughtful, well-made rubric requires substantial investment, and includes information unlikely to help students (is it useful for students know the criteria for a "0" on any assignment?). What if you could provide students with all of the relevant information for success on an assignment that a traditional rubric imparts without having to painstakingly describe each point? The single-point rubric does just that. It includes a description of the standards for mastering the content, and also allows you  to give detailed feedback on both where students exceed and fall below expectations.

Concerns (Areas that need work)	Criteria (Standards of performance)	Advanced (Areas that exceeded expectations)
	Criteria #1 Description of evidence of mastery of material
	Criteria #2 Description of evidence of mastery of material
	Criteria #3 Description of evidence of mastery of material
	Criteria #4 Description of evidence of mastery of material

Gonzalez, J. (2014, October 09). [Single point rubric]. Retrieved February 15, 2017, from http://www.brilliant-insane.com/2014/10/single-point-rubric.html

The single point rubric gives students a clear target for mastery of material, with all of the information regarding low performance stripped away. This type of rubric allows for clarity in establishing standards as well as flexibility in grading. The downside is lack of specificity in assessment. It's great for grading, but not so good at reliably assessing students, relative to a more analytic rubric.

An additional caveat is the type of grading this rubric addresses. Single point rubrics lend themselves to a no-grades system in the classroom and are typically used to encourage student reflection and self-guided mastery of material, not a traditional "A" to "F" grading scale. Also, using this kind of rubric may require more writing when grading an assignment than a traditional rubric but, again, allows flexibility in addressing areas in which students need to improve.


Keep updated with OFE:

 

Alternatives To Traditional Final Exams Encourage Student Engagement, Learning

When students leave college classrooms at the end of the semester, what are they really taking away with them? Too often, courses culminate in a student turning in a traditional multiple-choice final exam, quietly muttering "Thank you" to the professor, and walking out of the lecture hall having learned little of substance that will stay with them for more than a couple months. The suggestion to exchange final exams for semester 'finales' may seem far-fetched, but the idea might have practical value.

The most common reason students walk out of a course without having learned meaningfully is that they never made course material relevant to themselves. Past research indicates that students experience greater levels of motivation to learn when their teachers make content personally relevant to the students. Personalizing knowledge by putting it into one's own context is all that it takes for students to understand more deeply, rather than just hearing information, memorizing it, and regurgitating it without having ever really thought about it.

There are plenty of examples as to what a semester "finale" might look like. In general, they all focus on giving students an ultimate experience they can use to make course material personal and practical for them- something they can take with them into their future. The idea is to get students thinking,especially on the last day, so they can leave the course still mulling over what they've learned and how it can continue to apply to their intellectual life. Presenting students with just one particularly novel, perplexing question, for example, and asking them to solve it within a confined time is one way to change the final assessment paradigm. Perhaps instead of a final exam, the last day of the course could be a rubric-outlined debate or a collaborative assignment.

The point is, there is a serious lack of genuineness and creativity in the way most professors assess their students at the end of their courses. Final exams as they stand now often make the end of the semester feel more like a chore than a crescendo of an academic experience. By adding a little novelty, a little intrigue, and a little excitement, professors can create an end of the semester assessment that students will be talking about, and thinking about, long after the course is finished.

How do you add creativity and engagement in your final exams?


Keep updated with OFE:

Is Your Grading Biased? Beware the Halo Effect

Humans are prone to taking mental short cuts, it's part of the physiology of our brains. We are exposed to so much information throughout our lives and from day-to-day that it is necessary for our brain to utilize mental short-cuts (i.e., heuristics) to help sort information and to determine what should grab one's attention. Heuristics are mental guidelines you create from your experience to help you reach an answer more quickly than by algorithm searching through every possible answer. The only problem is that this quick thinking can also bias cognition and decision-making, and grading is no exception.

The Halo effect is one form of heuristic bias that impacts everyone's decision making. It happens when we find good qualities in an individual and, through experience, incorporate those good qualities as part of our perception of the person. This biases the way we perceive their actions, whether good or bad. For instance, attractive individuals are often perceived to be more intelligent, talented, and generally good more often than individuals of average attractiveness.

The Halo effect can produce biases in grading just like any other area of judgment. In a previous post we discussed briefly how faculty will frequently grade students based on their personal characteristics and past performance rather than solely on their performance on the work in question. Faculty may begin reading an assignment, stop and think, 'so-and-so usually does great work' and allow that judgment to alter the way they grade the assignment.

This bias in judgment and decision-making process is exactly what researchers found at work in a study examining the Halo effect in subjective student assessments. The researchers randomly assigned faculty to observe a student perform either very poorly or very well on an oral presentation, and then graded the student on a written assignment. When grading the exact same student on the exact same writing assignment, faculty members gave substantially higher grades when the students had done well in a presentation before being graded and lower grades when the students had done poorly before being graded. Other than giving either a poor or good oral performance, the student was the same and the quality of the written assignment was the same. And yet the grades were different. Prior experience with students will bias the way faculty members grade students on future assessments, but by being aware of this "Halo effect", faculty can more effectively protect against bias. Making student assessments anonymous is another effective was to reduce biased grading.

Testing Critical Thinking using Multiple Choice Questions

Teaching and assessing critical thinking in student work is a priority for many faculty. Faculty typically assess critical thinking through essay test questions and lengthy assignments, both of which are time consuming to grade. Multiple choice questions are quick to grade but typically are constructed to test recall and comprehension. This workshop will provide guidance and practice in crafting multiple-choice test items that assess higher-order and critical thinking skills of analysis and evaluation. 
Testing Critical Thinking using Multiple Choice Questions
Friday, October 30th, 2015, 1:00-2:00 p.m.
Biology Building 59, Room 2701
RSVP to ofe@unf.edu

This event will be especially helpful to those teaching General Education courses that satisfy the Critical Thinking requirement. 
Participants are asked to post (up to 5) example critical thinking multiple choice questions prior to joining the workshop. Contact Dan Richard drichard@unf.edu for details.

Pragmatism, Plagiarism, & Integrity - SOARS Event

Every year, students struggle with completing assignments, and the various demands on their time and effort can lead them to take short-cuts or even to cheat.

Especially at this time of year when large projects and writing assignments are due, faculty are faced with making decisions as to whether student submitted their own work or the work of someone else.

During the Showcase of Osprey Advancements in Research & Scholarship (SOARS) conference on Friday, April 19^th, there will be a couple of events that will address these issues. One is a faculty-student forum at 11:45 - 1:00 in the Student Union Ballroom A-B (at the University of North Florida) on and the other, a Keynote Address by Dr. Donald L. McCabe, Professor of Management and Global Business at Rutgers University, titled Promoting Academic Integrity.
I encourage you to attend these worthwhile and engaging events.

Best,

Dan Richard

Pragmatism or Plagiarism? a SOARS Faculty-Student Forum

Moderator: Dr. Judith Ochrietor, Department of Biology

Panelists: Thomas J. Van Schoor, Student Ombudsman	Natalie Hofmann, OUR Research Fellow
Andrea McLeod, Assistant Registrar	Aaron Leedy, Faculty & Former Student
F. Dan Richard, Director, Office of Faculty Enhancement

During this interactive forum the audience will watch short vignettes in which students discuss writing papers revealing some of the questions, myths, and misperceptions about plagiarism. After each vignette, audience members will be invited to respond to questions about their perceptions of the students’ behavior using their cell phones. Results of these polls will be immediately displayed. The moderator will then help guide a discussion about the audience’s perceptions of the students’ writing approaches, whether or not the students’ approaches constitute plagiarism, and, if so, what the consequences should be. Members of the panel will serve as resources for audience participants by answering questions and clarifying UNF procedures and processes.

Keynote Address

Dr. Donald L. McCabe

Promoting Academic Integrity

Dr. McCabe is a Professor of Management and Global Business at Rutgers University. For more than twenty years he has done extensive research on college cheating, surveying over 250,000 students at more than 220 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. He has also surveyed over 40,000 high school students in the United States during the last ten to fifteen years. His work has been published widely in business, education, and sociology journals and he is founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity, a consortium of over 300 colleges and universities based at Clemson University. Members of this consortium are joined in a united effort to promote academic integrity among college and university students.

Dr. McCabe earned a B.A. in Chemistry from Princeton University (1966), an M.B.A. in Marketing from Seton Hall University (1970), and a Ph.D. in Management from New York University (1985). He worked for over 20 years in the corporate world before joining Rutgers University in 1988. His last corporate position was Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Devro, Inc., a Johnson & Johnson company.

Have Money, Will Pass

As online education expands, students are finding ways to credential themselves without paying their academic dues -- by studying. Instead, students in online classes can pay an online service that will take their online courses for them. In a recent Inside Higher Ed article, Alexandra Tilsley discusses an old problem with a new face, cheating to make the grade, but in this case, the cheating is done by identity mimicking. This seems to be the latest in an arms race in which students to find ways to pass without studying and institutions of higher education find ways to promote integrity. Read more on the problem and what institutions are doing to deal with the new threat.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/21/sites-offering-take-courses-fee-pose-risk-online-ed

Frankly Fridays - The Erosion of the Credit Hour

You are invited you to the first installment of a new OFE event series called

Frankly Fridays

Frank Conversation about Faculty Issues"honest as a cup of joe"

Friday, February 15^th, Friday
9:30-10:30 AM
Osprey Commons Faculty Lounge (Building 16, 4^th Floor)

Topic: The Erosion of the Credit Hour
Let us know you will be there: ofe@unf.edu

Have you ever had two students with the same list of courses and credit hours but with completely different skill levels?
Have you become worn by students questioning your grading by saying, “but I passed my writing course?”

Is a measure of “time in seat” useful, or should the focus be on other measures of student success?

Students accumulate credit hours for courses taken, although the original conception of the credit hour was not for students but for faculty. Two recent Chronicle commentaries about the legacy and value of the credit hour. With a push in higher education for efficiency and movement by the State of Florida to make higher education less expensive, the credit hour is under attack.

Come discuss how these issues impact UNF and faculty in Florida.
We will meet in the new Faculty Lounge on the 4^th floor of the new dining facility, Osprey Commons.
OFE will provide the coffee and bagels.

Let us know you will be there: ofe@unf.edu

What does a Credit Hour Represent If Not Time?

A new report out by the New America Foundation questions the logic and effects of the traditional definition of the credit hour. The report highlights several problems with the current model, one that uses time as a marker of progress. One convincing chart shows that students who have gained additional credit hours (from freshman to senior) do not necessarily perform better on standardized tests. Another issue addressed in the report is the influence of grade inflation on the interpretation of credit hours. For example, in 1961, only 15% of students received a letter grade of A in a college course. In recent years, the number has increased to 43%.
Recommendations to address the issue include changing the definition of the credit hour or going to a credential system, which would allow students to demonstrate learning despite the amount of time they spent accumulating that learning.
To read a summary of the report, read the report by the New America Foundation on their website.
http://education.newamerica.net/publications/policy/cracking_the_credit_hour
For the full report, visit the report website.
http://higheredwatch.newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Cracking_the_Credit_Hour_Sept5_0.pdf

Reactions to Grading

As a part of every semester, faculty provide grades for students (and for the institutions where they teach). In a recent Chronicle article, Ahmed Afzaal describes common misconceptions students have about grading and how instructors can address these misconceptions. Read more at the following link.
http://chronicle.com/article/GradingIts-Discontents/132789/

How do students respond to grades in your courses? How do you handle the discouraging comments and requests?

Income Inequality, Trust, and Academic Dishonesty

Is the growing problems with cheating in US colleges and universities related to economics? In a recent article, psychologists have observed a link between economic inequality in a state and the amount of cheating in that state (measured by the number of Google searches for "buy term papers" and national pay-for-paper websites). They suggest that the way to reduce academic dishonesty is to build trust between teachers and students, students and students, and within society as a whole. Read the summary of the research on the Association for Psychological Science website.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/income-inequality-and-distrust-foster-academic-dishonesty.html

Academic Integrity Exercise

Deborah Zarka Miller at Anderson University recently published an article about an assignment she uses to teach her students about plagiarism. Instead of having students engage in plagiarism or try to detect plagiarism, she has students become victims of plagiarism. She describes the activity in this recent article.
http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/a-lesson-in-academic-integrity-as-students-feel-the-injustice-of-plagiarism/

Photo credit: clarita from morguefile.com

Grading is like Building a Fence

 In a recent Chronicle article, an experienced graduate student, David Brooks, discusses the personal challenges he experienced in providing feedback on students' work. He addresses how much feedback is enough.

http://chronicle.com/article/Wielding-the-Red-Pen/126200/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en