Self-grading for Attendance and Participation

Martin E. Malandro

In this article, I discuss how I used self-grading exercises to assign attendance and participation scores in my junior-level proof-based mathematics class following the transition to remote teaching in the Spring 2020 semester. At my university, the decision to conduct the rest of the semester remotely was made over spring break. Students received an extra week of spring break, while instructors used this extra week to reconfigure their classes for online delivery.

I have been excited about self-grading ever since I read the article “But You Can’t Do That in a STEM course!” (Cangialosi), and I have been experimenting with self-grading activities since the Spring 2019 semester. I have always found it difficult to assign semester-long participation scores, and at the beginning of the Spring 2020 semester I decided to experiment with using self-grading activities to do so.

My grading policy included an item called “attendance and participation,” which counted as 10% of the course grade. I wanted to keep my grading scale the same after moving the course online, so I had to re-think what attendance and participation meant for the course. Prior to spring break, participation meant things like being attentive in class, participating in in-class activities, and giving thoughtful feedback to peers. I was planning on having students fill out two self-assessments over the course of the semester to help me assign these grades. I hadn’t told the students about this prior to spring break, and I was planning to assign the first self-assessment the week we returned from spring break. Since we did not return in person, I had to tweak the self-assessment assignments to ask questions about the new environment we found ourselves in.

In the first self-assessment, I wanted to accomplish several things:

• I wanted to understand my students’ thoughts on their own behaviors in class so far, prior to spring break. I felt that I had a few slackers in the course, and I wanted to see if they would acknowledge this.

• Among students who were not attending or participating sufficiently, I wanted to understand why and see if I could do anything to help.

• I wanted my students to state in writing what positive changes they intended to make in their level of effort in the course.

• Finally, as a pandemic-related issue, I wanted to make sure my students had the necessary equipment to complete the course in the newly-online environment.

I discovered several interesting things.

Some students faced a massive upheaval in their personal lives that they might not have otherwise told me about. Students who worked service jobs found their working hours increased, and became unable to attend class virtually at our normal class times. I worked quickly to accommodate them.

Some students disclosed medical reasons for being distracted in class. Some students who I was worried about mentioned that they were in fact focusing and following along in class despite not speaking up much in class. The students who were not doing great said their participation was sufficient to achieve their goals so far—this basically told me they would be fine with a C or D in the class and that I should not worry too much about them.

I also learned that all of my students had the computer equipment necessary to complete the class as I had redesigned it, so I did not need to do any major overhauls to the redesign that I had worked so hard on over spring break. This was a big relief.

My question about what changes students intended to make to achieve their goals in the course fell a bit flat. Most students simply said that they would do the new things I asked them to do in the second half of the course. I think this question would work better in a normal semester, where we would have continuity in the types of activities between the two halves of the semester.

In the final self-assessment, I wanted to understand how well students had interacted with my course, given the new circumstances they found themselves in. I also wanted to understand how their level of effort had changed since spring break. I chose not to ask questions like, “How many homework assignments did you turn in?” because I intended to factor that sort of information into their scores independently. With these self-assessments, I hoped to delve deeper into why their performance in the course was what it was. If I were giving this kind of self-assessment during a normal semester, instead of asking how the epidemic had affected my students, I would ask questions like “How have your work/home/personal situations affected the amount of time you had available to work on this class, and how well have you utilized that time?”

Most of my students were harsher on themselves than I would have been. Several gave themselves low grades, despite acknowledging difficult personal circumstances and reporting that they had made good use of their limited time. This is one reason I asked for a letter grade instead of a number from them. I wanted the flexibility both to assign grades at either end of the letter scale when I largely agreed with their self-assessments, and to assign even higher or lower grades as warranted. I found women and minorities to be harsher on themselves than others overall, and for many of them I found myself assigning grades one or two letters higher than the grades they gave themselves.

Overall, I found these self-assessments to be helpful for planning my course, finding ways to help students, getting students to reflect on their own efforts, and assigning meaningful participation scores. I plan to use similar instruments in my future courses, including both online and in-person courses at the freshman and sophomore level, in which attendance and participation factor into course grades.

Works Cited

Cangialosi, Karen. “But You Can't Do That in a STEM Course!” Hybrid Pedagogy, 26 June 2018, hybridpedagogy.org/do-in-a-stem-course/.

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Malandro - Attendance and Participation Self-Assessment Spring 2020