Science & Society is a College Now course at Guttman that engages students on topics at the intersection of science and everyday life through an interdisciplinary lens.
Problem of Practice
In order to help students work through/relate to the material covered, I give a weekly practice task, where students are asked to role play certain stakeholders working through a real-life problem. These types of learning activities aren’t challenging/time consuming but they help to creatively reinforce material. Unfortunately, many students don’t complete them or don’t do them on time. They catch up at the end of term. But, this diminishes the power of the activities to reflect on/reinforce the material covered that week. At the end of term, they’re just quickly going through the assignments to get them done. Some students consistently miss assignment deadlines or fail to turn in assignments altogether.
How can we encourage students to complete assignments on time?
Strategy
After reviewing the prompts for the assignments and asking students if they have any questions, give students a few minutes to re-read the respective prompt and come up with a few questions for participation credit. If engagement is low, consider putting students in groups to discuss and formulate questions together. By encouraging students to actively interrogate the assignment prompts ahead of submission, we can ensure students have a better grasp of the assignment and get a head start on puzzling through the task.
Documentation
Module 2 Questions
Figure #1: Module 2 Questions
Module 3 Questions
Figure #2: Module 3 Questions
Measuring Impact
Tracking Outcomes
This measure shows the rate of students asking questions as well as timely submission of assignments. *Two students were absent on the due date.
Figure #3: Tracking Outcomes
Analysis
“Active over passive learning” is a well-worn pedagogical best practice. We draft creative, interactive, detailed assignments. We review the prompts with as much enthusiasm as we can muster. We ask if there are any questions. Maybe there is a question or two...
Encouraging students to focus on reading the prompt and asking questions, even seemingly silly ones, with a bit of participation credit can go a long way in both clarifying the assignment for the class, especially less vocal students, and nudging students to start thinking through the assignment ahead of the submission deadline.
Recommendation
In the beginning of the course, reviewing participation, discuss community/shared learning; stress the importance of active engagement for credit. Schedule an extra 15 minutes to review assignment prompts, allowing students to re-read the prompt for a few minutes and formulate questions. Reassure students that no question is too trivial. Remind students about the discussion on active participation from earlier in the term. Over the course of term, demonstrate to students the value of interrogating prompts by discussing the link between questions and richness of submissions.
