This semester was particularly challenging because I was teaching two sections of this course. However, it gave me the opportunity to really improve my lectures. (In order to compensate for any disparity in lecture quality, I would record and post audio to my afternoon lectures.)
As my second full semester teaching I was able to begin to bring new practices into my classroom. One of these practices was giving students hints or next steps on my exam. I touch on this in my teaching statement, but my goal in doing this was to provide students a way to earn more partial credit on a problem and consequently provide me more accurate means of assessment. As I discuss below, I also implemented test corrections which improved student performance on the common final. Lastly, this semester I received a lot of feedback about the assignment structure and have since changed aspects of my course to incorporate student feedback.
When teaching these topics I decided to do a guided worksheet. That is, I provided the students a worksheet and lectured based off of that worksheet. This allowed the students to have something concrete with the steps and examples written clearly, and it made it possible for me to write less on the board saving time for more explanations. Ultimately, I don’t think that this was a big enough deviation from lectures to mix things up. However, I maintain that these topics require careful guidance when they are introduced. In the future I think I would like to do more worksheets based learning.
This semester I decided to implement test corrections. I would return graded exams with a half-sheet of very specific instructions attached. Upon receiving this packet students had a week to complete corrections. All students, regardless of grade, were expected to turn in something. If they scored 100% they would turn in a homework problem of their choice. Otherwise, students would be expected to turn in correct solutions and brief reflections on their mistakes. In return for completing the packet and following all directions, students would receive a 10/10 to be included in the quiz category. Within this category I only take the highest 10 grades, so turning in test corrections means students are able to drop a low quiz grade. This practice of giving students credit for taking the time to learn from their mistakes proved to be very helpful for them when it came time to take the final.
In both of the sections, I think the most constructive feedback I received was about the value of the assignments and how they corresponded to the grades. I decided to keep my grade structure from the previous spring, which meant that there was no credit given for homework. To incentivize students to do the assignments, I would choose quiz questions directly from the assignments. One student specifically remarked that they were upset that they didn’t receive credit for the assignments they were working on. They correctly pointed out that the fact that for students who struggle with written exams, the grading scheme didn’t recognize the effort they were putting in outside of class. In subsequent semesters, I chose to use WebWork to enable me to easily incorporate assignments into my grading scheme.