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While the
end-of-class debriefing session is a critical means of
giving students immediate feedback on their learning,
faculty are always required to provide students with more
formal assessments: grades. Grading in the A/CL classroom
can differ from the more traditional classroom in two ways.
First, faculty in the A/CL classroom must decide whether or
not to grade or assign points to in-class activities. This
decision is usually relatively simple. Many of our faculty
don't grade in-class activities at all; others grade a
random selection of in-class assignments. More rare are
those faculty-usually those with Teaching Assistants-who
grade all in-class activities.
Second, is
the much more complex decision of how and if to use group
grades. Group grades are one of the more controversial
aspects of active/cooperative learning. As
Karl Smith notes below,
group grades are not an essential part of the A/CL
classroom. Some faculty regularly use active/cooperative
strategies in class to help students process the course
content and acquire problem solving skills. These in-class
activities are not graded and grades for homework, exams, or
papers are given to individuals just as they would be in a
lecture-based class. On the other hand, engineering students
are regularly expected to work in teams on design projects.
In such a class, it would be difficult to use a purely
individual grading scheme.
Darwyn Linder cautions that
group grades only be used only for true group tasks, in
which it would be difficult for a student to free-ride.
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Karl Smith |
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Professor of
Civil Engineering
Institute of Technology, University of Minnesota
|
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Darwyn Linder
|
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Professor
and Chair, Department of Psychology
Arizona State University
|
Click below
to find out more about how faculty balance group and
individual grades.
|
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Eric Guilbeau
|
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Chair,
Bioengineering Department
Arizona State University
|
|
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P.K. Imbrie
|
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Assistant
Professor of Engineering, Department of Freshman
Engineering
Purdue University
|
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Cesar Malave
|
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Associate
Professor of Industrial Engineering
Texas A&M University
|
| |
Greg Raupp |
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Associate
Dean for Research, Engineering College
Arizona State University
|
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Jim Richardson
|
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Associate
Professor in the Civil Engineering Department
University of Alabama
|
More
information on grading, especially the use of peer
assessments, may be found in the section on
Managing Out-of-Class Projects
Also see
sample
Assessment forms in the
Featured Lessons and Activities section of this CD/web site. |
