Assessing students when they are remote from you can be challenging, whether it's because students can't easily clarify instructions, or you have concerns about academic integrity.
The Checklist
Check over your Week 1 assignments to make sure they have clear instructions, including instructions on how to submit them. Are the due dates and availability settings correct? Is the submission type (on paper, external tool, file, text box) correct?
Review your entire course. Are assignments separated into groups? Are they arranged properly in the gradebook?
If you have specific guidance about academic integrity, and what that means in your course, create a document (and an activity!) that covers that material in the first week.
Assessing work from remote students
When students are largely working on their own, physically separated from their instructor and their classmates, assignment and quiz instructions need to be crystal clear. Students can't ask the person sitting next to them if they understand what they're supposed to do on an assignment. Students can't ask their instructor about a quiz question during class.
The clearer your instructions are, the greater the chances that your students will successfully complete your assignments and quizzes without bombarding you with email messages asking for clarification in the process.
Provide students with feedback they can use, and then use a "wrapper" to help students reflect on what worked and what didn't--and to give you insight into how the student is working on your assignments and preparing for your quizzes.
Ask a friend, family member, colleague, student, Instructional Design Faculty-in-Residence, or complete stranger to review your assignment instructions
Have a plan for providing feedback
TiLT your assignments
The Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TiLT) framework asks instructors to be clear about what the purpose of each assignment is, what task the students are to engage in, and the criteria that will be used to evaluate student work.
With any writing you do, you know what you are trying to convey, so it can be hard to read your own writing from the perspective of someone else. That's why the best writers have excellent editors standing over their shoulders reading--and commenting on--everything they write. While you may not have an excellent editor, you have the next best thing: people who are willing to critique your work.
Here are some questions your reviewers can address:
If you were a student
Do you know why you are being asked to do this assignment?
Do you know what you need to do first? Next? After that?
Do you know how this assignment will be scored?
Did you see anything that didn't make sense to you? Or where I could be clearer?
What is the most confusing part of this assignment?
Provide substantive feedback
As soon as possible, provide specific feedback about what the student did well and about what the student can improve. Focus on how your feedback can help students do better on the next assignment. (Read more here.Links to an external site.) While good rubrics can help structure your feedback, written feedback needs to move beyond "Great job!" What about the job made it great?
Academic honesty and assignments
Be explicit with students about the resources they may use when completing assignments.
It's important that all instructors be aware of "study" sites, like CourseheroLinks to an external site. and CheggLinks to an external site.. Students with a paid subscription can post assignment questions to the site, and the site's hired "experts" will answer the question, often within a couple hours. The question and answer are then available for other paid subscribers to see. If you have reason to believe that one of your questions has been posted on such a site, search for your question, not the answer. Those without a paid subscription can view the entire question and the first few lines of the answer. If you wrote the question, you may request that these sites remove your question (and, by extension, the answer) as a copyright violation.
Ask a friend, family member, colleague, student, Instructional Design Faculty-in-Residence, or complete stranger to review your quiz instructions and your quiz questions.
Why quizzes are useful
In its most basic form, quizzes are a learning tool that assesses retention of knowledge. But when done well, quizzes also serve two very important functions.
For you, as an instructor, quizzes can provide valuable feedback on your teaching.
For students, quizzes can be used as a crucial building block towards strong critical thinking skills and can provide immediate feedback about what the students have learned or need more practice on.
When testing to measure a student's ability to retrieve information, there are multiple net effects that occur. Accompanied by appropriate instruction, testing encourages students to engage and organize the material to an extent they may not otherwise do.
Once a quiz has been graded, the real fun then begins for you as instructor. Quizzes are only as effective as you want them to be. Canvas has powerful quiz analytics that allow you to look closely at individual student performances as well as focus in on specific questions. In addition, there are course analytics so that if you give weekly quizzes you can track both individual and course-wide progress.
Academic honesty and quizzes
Be explicit with students about the resources they may use when taking the quiz. Allowing students to use all of the resources at their disposal, except for each other, say, will minimize concerns about cheating. Or perhaps you would like your students to work together. Students can learn a lot by talking through questions with each other.
Applied questions--questions where students have to apply the information they learned in the course to a novel situation--are stronger open-book questions than, say, questions about definitions.
Be aware that most test banks provided by publishers have found their way onto the Internet and are easily Google-able.
For Summer 2020, Highline has a subscription to Honorlock, an exam surveillance tool. You can read more about it here. Look very carefully at the requirements for students in order to use Honorlock. For example, students must have a computer, webcam, mic, and a high speed internet connection and allow Honorlock to record their audio and video in addition to their computer screen. This raises a number of equity concerns. You can imagine how these requirements would be difficult for some Highline students to meet.
Just as it is useful for instructors to reflect on what worked well and what can be improved after each class session, after each exam, and after each assignment, it is useful for students to do the same.
Assignment or exam "wrappers" are low-stakes assignments--just a few questions long--that ask students to reflect on what they did well and where they can make improvements for next time.
Wrappers provide instructors the opportunity to see where students may be struggling. If you see that a student reports putting 15 minutes into an assignment that should have taken two hours, you can check in with the student to see what might have contributed to that minimal amount of time. Is the student overextended with various time commitments? Or is the student more generally having a difficult time with time management? Or, perhaps, that was a particularly hard week filled with family issues? Knowing more about what may be behind a student's difficulty will put you in a better position to help.
As students improve over the course of the quarter, wrappers provide an excellent opportunity to celebrate those successes with students. For example, "I am so glad to see that the time management strategies we talked about made a difference for you on this assignment!"
You can find examples of wrappers by clicking the links below.
Learn more about using assignment and exam wrappers