Assessments

Rubrics
Quizzes and Exams
Labs and Studios


Rubrics

Perhaps the single most valuable tool you have at your disposal is the rubric. Clear rubrics will save you time grading, clearly communicate expectations to students, and let you quickly, clearly, and precisely explain grading decisions to students. Maybe you already use rubrics in your in-person teaching and simply want to adapt them for online teaching; maybe rubrics are new to you. Either way, the good news is that there is an abundance of good material out there for you to adapt to your own classes.

Some places to start – these resources are just the tip of the iceberg:

Designing a good rubric takes a little time up front, but will save you hours in the long run. Begin by developing a detailed mental model of how the abilities you are fostering in your students will manifest in the assessment. Use the language of your rubric to express, very clearly and precisely, what an “excellent” response will include, and so forth. Run the model a few times on past assignments or model responses you construct as a “reality check.”

Make sure the grades (if you’re using a graded rubric) correspond to grades you’d be comfortable giving. The numerical ranges do not have to be equally divided. For example, if your “novice” category is set at 0-3 out of 10, would you really give students no more than 30% on that assessment? If you’d tend to give “novice” performers something more like 70%, make sure your grading ranges reflect that.

Quizzes and Exams

Building quizzes into your weekly routine can take some of the pressure off of high-stakes exam assessments, and help faculty diagnose problems students are having early, which is harder to do now that we are not in close regular contact with them. Many faculty report better student outcomes after the shift to online teaching from frequent, lower-stakes assessments (e.g. transitioning prelims to weekly quizzes): students performed better and there may be less incentive for academic integrity violations.

Yet this sentiment was not universal: one faculty member describes the shift as having expanded the feeling of “exam stress” for faculty and students alike from the day or so around the exam to the entire semester. Those feelings may be mitigated to some extent by acknowledging that just as we can get by with somewhat reduced lecture time, so can short, targeted quizzes be useful assessments. As always, assiduous communication of expectations is key to reducing student stress (and the faculty stress that results).

Communication is even more important for exams. Build in time before exams to explain to the students what will be asked of them, how to prepare, and how long to budget for completing the exam itself (no one should be giving an exam that takes 16 hours to complete just because it’s available for a 24 hour window). Give them opportunities to practice the kinds of problems they’ll be doing on the exam, which may be different from old versions of the exam and from the kinds of problems they are assigned in problem sets.

This practice can also alert you to cases when a new style of problem takes students longer than you would expect: as more of us shift to complex assessments suitable for open-book exams, it can be surprising how much students struggle with them. Observing students practicing those new activities in a low-stakes environment can help us refine our exams to an appropriate length and level of complexity.

Labs and Studios

While many of our normal classroom activities become difficult to maintain while teaching online, those very constraints have incentivized faculty to explore, develop, and collate resources for new online activities. This enormous list of online lab simulations, datasets, and other materials for science courses (plus a few more general resources, like “Google VR Expeditions”) is well worth a look. Labs are of course a particularly tough challenge for online teaching, but several faculty report success with using simulators, home kits (e.g. Arduino kits), and remote-controlled lab experiments to replicate at least some aspects of the lab.

If you go down the home-kit road, however, make sure you are not putting the cost burden on your students. Check with your department for funding; if you still must pass costs on to your students, consider compensating by assigning an open-source textbook. Communicate to your students the educational benefits of the lab supplies they are buying and the steps you have taken to balance their total expenses. Most financial aid sources can be used for supplies necessary to complete a program.

One highlight worth noting is that several of the listed resources focus on giving students access to labs and data from institutions all over the world, allowing lab work to engage globally in new ways.

Faculty needing to shift a lab course online are justifiably worried about maintaining staff during this period. Suggestions for ways of “pivoting” staff and TA work while labs are online have included encouraging TAs located elsewhere in the world to manage work with students in the region to combat the time zone difference, devoting staff time to one-on-one or small group virtual instruction on equipment and techniques in the lab, and similarly setting up one-on-one guidance for students performing lab activities at home so they get the same kind of immediate feedback they would in the lab.

Faculty teaching studio and performance courses, as well as some lab instructors, found success adjusting their learning objectives to highlight the skills that could best continue to be taught in an online mode. On the studio side, these included a focus on solo performances and projects, pedagogy and methodology, history and theory. Interviews, performances, and lectures from guest artists also proved successful. For labs, assessments focusing on data analysis, presentation and communications skills and teamwork were most successful online.

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