Taking Stock
A semester of . . . failure?
Now that the spring semester has ended, I’m evaluating what worked and what didn’t in my teaching. This post refers to a course on globalization in which students build ArcGIS StoryMaps. Of the 15 students in the class at the end of the semester:
5 chose not to complete the first low-stakes StoryMap assignment, intended to let students know where they stood and where they were headed. These students earned a zero on the assignment.
All 15 submitted the second StoryMap assignment, also low-stakes and an opportunity to receive feedback, but 6 didn’t bother to check whether others could view their work.1 These students earned a zero on the assignment.
1 did not submit the final phase of the StoryMap project (zero), worth up to 10 percent of the course grade. The other fourteen earned an average score 50 out of a possible 100 points, mainly because they didn’t follow the same directions that they had failed to follow for the first two assignments, like “you are prohibited from using copyrighted images” and “proofread for correct spelling.”
Students exhibited these same behaviors with the final exam. Only 7 of them chose to complete it. The other 8 earned, by default, a zero.
The good news is that, unlike Harvard, I’m successfully combating grade inflation. Here is the distribution of grades for the course:
A: None
B: 4
C: 4
D: 7
F: None
The bad news is that I can’t force students to learn, because learning requires interest and effort. The few students who expressed concern about their performance during the semester did so only in terms of grades, not in terms of how they might better acquire knowledge and skills applicable to their lives after college.
For example, an alumna graciously accepted my invitation to return to campus to speak to the class. As someone whose job involves overseeing a supply chain that moves millions of dollars of merchandise into the country each year, she’s a living example of globalization. When it came time for students to ask her questions, they didn’t. Not a peep. So I asked a question: “Is your employer hiring?” Yes. Still nothing from students in the room. I ended class and thanked her for coming.
Directions for these assignments included the following statement: “Your StoryMap must be set to share/public when published. Review the Digital Literacy section of the syllabus. Work that I am unable to access will earn a grade of zero.”
oh dear!