Right Now

Midsemester: Obtaining Student Feeeback

Around the semester midpoint it’s a good idea to solicit feedback from students about how the course is going.  Midsemester feedback:

• Provides an opportunity to show that you’re listening to student concerns.
• Provides an opportunity for you to refocus, if necessary.

The start-stop-continue is a simple feedback tool that will help you to see if your course is on track and provide the information you need to make adjustments.

Midsemester: Assessing Class Participation

Class participation is a component of the grade for many classes and students often like to get some feedback on their participation before the semester is over. One effective way of providing midsemester feedback is to ask students to assess their own participation, both in terms of frequency of participation and quality of the contribution to class learning. Ask students to grade themselves on each of these dimensions along with a short explanation of each and an overall grade. You can then respond back to them, indicating whether you agree or not and why. 

If you did not have students do a self-assessment at mid-semester, you may still want to have them do a self-assessment as an input to their final grades.

Most students are thoughtful about their self-assessments. A few may use the exercise as a marketing one, giving themselves a much higher grade than their participation warrants, but about as many will undervalue their participation.

The First Major Graded Assignment

Early Assessment: How's my course going?

First Class

Finalizing the Syllabus

October 16, 2008