With an explicit focus on counteracting poor rates of student engagement with weekly readings, as well as providing feedback-rich assessment, this technique adapts traditional online quizzes with the addition of a consultative in-class element. As a supplement to digitally-generated marks and detailed online feedback, students further deliberate on quiz questions in dedicated lectures or tutorials as part of open discussions or exercises tailored around specific quiz questions. This approach builds on the traditional value of quizzes to support comprehension-checking, to additionally foster collegiate discussion as well as higher level engagement in class activities. Based on cohort performance the coordinator develops questions or exercises that reinforce the content of those areas a majority find challenging; or which open discussion for the revision of course content. Class time is allocated to these sessions at the coordinator's discretion. In ENGL1500 this assessment additionally encourages deep reading of longform texts and fosters a pleasure in literary studies. Attributing final grades to pre-class reading tasks incentivises students to prioritise this assessment just as they prioritise essay or exams by appealing to a grade-centred, return on investment culture.
Details
- CLASS SIZE
- 40-60
- CLASS LEVEL
- First year
- ASSESSMENT SECURITY
- High security
- TIME REQUIREMENTS
- Medium time
- CONDITIONS
- Sequence
- TAGS
- technology enriched learning, feedback-rich, discussion prompt, quiz
Advantages
Incentivises students to engage with course content, provides technology enriched feedback to students, and helps to identify students at risk (via comprehension checking and in-class discussions). The interactive learning encouraged in this technique helps build students' critical thinking skills as well as offer an opportunity to practice effective communication. Critical, deep reading is foundational to all HaSS disciplines, as is encouraging a thorough engagement with course content, making this assessment well suited to all HaSS courses.
Challenges
The full benefits of this technique are realised when students attend discussion sessions. Students have engaged well with this technique in its current deliveries, but coordinators may need to be prepared to respond to attendance/attrition issues should they arise. It can be initially time intensive to create questions with detailed feedback– this can be mitigated against by initially creating a small question set and adding to this in subsequent iterations of the course.
Tips for implementation
Staff overseeing this technique should dedicate some time to identifying students struggling with content and encouraging their participation in discussion sessions (based on monitoring performance in quizzes).
How it supports academic integrity
Students access online quizzes via their via student identifier which may discourage them from outsourcing this task. Additionally, students discuss the content of the quizzes in-class where staff may observe discrepancies in their spoken comprehension and online performance.
Dr Judith Seaboyer
j.seaboyer@uq.edu.au
My research focuses on contemporary fiction, and on student engagement and the pedagogy of reading well.I teach contemporary fiction at honours and undergraduate level. Contemporary authors taught represent a range of national literatures and include Alison Bechdel, J. M. Coetzee, Damon Galgut, Mohsin Hamid, Barbara Kingsolver, Ian McEwan, and Ruth Ozeki. Courses in the long nineteenth century have included Jane Austen, Kate Chopin, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Virginia Woolf, along with non-fiction. I am a participant researcher in a 2011-2013 Australian Learning and Teaching Council cross-institutional project that researched and developed practical skills designed to encourage students to become better readers, and thus better writers and researchers. In Semester 1 2013 I held a UQ Learning and Innovation Fellowship that allowed me to test and develop a flipped classroom project that fostered online and classroom student engagement and better reading through online assessment. I am particularly interested in the practical aspects of developing research communities among students and between students and staff members. I have fostered an ongoing mentoring project for honours and postgraduate students, and supported a staff-student research project into the pastoral. Find out more