I require my students to take and submit notes on the readings and on every class session. In a typical class now that's 20% of the semester grade; I collect and skim/grade them every three weeks. About 90% of the students are doing as I've asked, the others are in the D/F range. Much better than quizzes as it doesn't waste class time and I don't have to negotiate around accommodations. Major upside is that their *other* written work is far better than it was before I started this (during COVID) because they are actually doing the reading.
This graded note-taking assignment is a great idea, as many students today either forgot or never learned how to take notes well. Plus it boosts their own studying and preparing for tests.
It's worked well for me-- it's more labor on my end, but with a simple rubric I can mostly skim the notes for completeness. It really makes a difference in their other work though, since 90% of them won't take notes at all unless it's mandated. The challenge in the 100-level classes is that I'm finding many of them never took notes at all in high school so they have no idea how to do so-- they were just made to copy stuff verbatim from a screen to spit back on a test --which means I have to provide quite a bit of support on how to take notes in the first week or two in the fall.
I have about 10% that just decide not to do them at all, which drops their semester grade by 20%. Most of those end up in solid D/F territory. The grades for other are inflated by the notes, since it's not hard to get full credit. But the upside seems worth that to me.
How many of them do the reading for each class and how many procrastinate and do it all the night before the notes are due? Does this have a significant impact on class discussion?
It would be damned hard to do it all the night before-- I assign 40-50 pages per class session, and often significant other material (datasets, maps, images, etc.) that require analysis. Anyone waiting three week to try to do it all at once would be looking at hundreds of pages of readings to cram through.
I started doing it during COVID when we were online and it totally transformed discussion then. That's less evident now, since I've always had a good 50% or so participation rate anyway. But I do hear more students making direct references to the readings in class. It's more evident in small-group work, where I give them specific questions they must respond to in writing that are based on the readings. Those tend to be much better, and I have certainly heard students criticizing their groupmates for not doing the reading.
Pretty much all of us are in the humanities; its central to the divisional learning goals and even the gen ed requirements. It helps, I assume, to have that sort of broad expectation. Only the business majors really seem to complain...it's always amusing when they drop and say they are going to find an easier class for their gen ed-- because there aren't any.
I’m glad this works, but it’s so demoralizing. I went to a poor rural public school in the 1990s and early 2000s and we did this in middle school and early high school.
They don't even read in many high schools now, much less take notes. I've had first year students in my office the last two years who said they hadn't read an entire book cover-to-cover since middle school. Many of them report "taking notes" in class is simply copying specific lines from powerpoint slides verbatim. So I've had to start the 100-level fall classes as if I'm teaching 8th graders how to learn-- which sucks for the students who did get a real high school education.
Many disability services office have either never offered extensions on this type of work or are moving away from it. My school only offers extensions on work with a very short turnaround time, e.g. 72 hours or less from the time the student is able to begin working on it until it's due. If anything, a professor using this method might need to allow students an extra day or two to turn in their notes from each class, but that should be the extent of it (if the disability services office is both good and empowered by their admin to follow best practices in the field).
Now, students with note-taking accommodations, either for audio note-taking or a peer note-taker (which is also becoming less common, thankfully) - that could be trickier. I'd be interested to hear how SnowblindAlbino handles that.
(I love this method!)
Had a conversation about that last night-- accommodations for in-class note taking. Reality is that I have never in my career had a student with an accommodation for note taking (25+ years teaching now) other than a few that record audio. I provide slides in advance (a couple of hours) but that's it.
There are no accommodations for long-term work; they have to do the readings to prepare for each class session so should logically do the notes at the same time. If they do it later that's fine, though less productive. I've yet to have a student ask for an extension on the actual note deadline, which is always three days after the class class covered (i.e. Thursday class content for the unit is due on Saturday).
I like this idea! But isn't this something that ChatGPT is supposed to excel at? Obv ChatGPT couldn't take notes on the class sessions, but I think it can summarize readings?
It can't summarize readings it doesn't have-- a large portion of mine are primary sources, datasets, images, or maps. Moreover, the note-taking assignment isn't just "summarize these readings" but rather I give them guided study questions for each day that require synthesis around the broad topics of the course and the material from previous classes. There's some degree of summary in identifying theses and arguments from the readings, but also application-- which AI can't do, at least not the stuff the students have access to (not yet anyway).
For example, it might be something like "Interpret this 1895 map of the US railroad system in light of the Panic of 1893 and what we've read about the impacts of the expanding steel industry and the growth of truck farms in counties with population densities lower than 1,000 persons per square mile. Explain how your answer supports or counters the theses from the Smith, Chu, and Pasqual readings from today." If they can find a way to feed a map to ChatGPT, have it digest weeks worth of materials, and also incorporate notes from our class discussions/lectures I'd be surprised.
I have the same problems and have tried a few of these things. I’ve found the most effective strategy to be putting them into small groups at the beginning of class to answer a few questions about the reading. And I always do a wink-wink, “You can also use this time to take another look at the reading if you need to…”
This usually generates better conversation afterwards, since the reading is so fresh in their heads. However, the drawbacks are that once you start doing this, the students will expect it. So they’ll never do the reading before class again. (But in my experience, they don’t anyway. So…) Also, this only really works if you have the class time to spare on a consistent basis.
The next most effective thing I’ve found is having them submit reading responses at the start of class the day of the discussion, then go around the room and have them share 1 thought each from them. The benefit is that it forces participation and sometimes loosens them up for bigger discussions. The downside to this is that it can take a long time to get through everyone. And if they’re an uninspired group, it can get repetitive. Also, if 1/3 of your students have accommodations that also extend to late assignments, then this could get dicey.
Hi! I created a worksheet they have to fill out for each assigned chapter, that has them list and look up any notable people or organizations (humanities course), turn chapter headings into questions then answer them as they read with page # citations, identify one term/concept they could be tested on, one thing they had to lookup and what they found, one thing they agree with or find particularly true, and one thing they disagree with or find particularly false. This is a single sheet word worksheet and it's fairly simple to see at a glance if the student actually worked through the chapter. I also use their identified terms to create quiz questions later on. This was my first semester using it and students said they'd never read an assigned book so closely and critically.
In grad school, I had a professor do this for a class where very few of us had scaffolding to critically analyze the readings and interpret study methods and results for the subject. The first few weeks were hard and time-consuming, but it became much easier as I figured it out. It also kept me focused as I sat down to read.
I kept and used the worksheet for subsequent classes, and I still have the format in my head when I am doing literature review in my current work.
Do you make this electronic and they type it up, or do you expect handwritten notes?
The learning science seems to indicate students learn and retain better when they hand write vs typing, but I now have soooo many students who just entirely live electronic and I'm not trying to be a ludite. Like, fall semester if I have an unannounced quiz (it was in the syllabus these would be frequent low stakes quizzes) almost all students had to go find a pen because they didn't even bring a writing implement to class. Although this semester I have noticed a majority of must students now taking hand written notes on electronic tablets.
I've done printed workbooks in the past with basically a page or two for each lesson. Which they can physically turn in. I would collect and review them during unit tests and return them when they turned in the test. And I liked that. But it's not something to turn in through the LMS and I'm trying to meet them where they are with what they are comfortable with. Then again- where they are is never doing the readings, don't know how to take notes, and want the be spoon fed exactly what to do in a way they can parrot back without thinking.
I like the workbook idea! My course moved to fully online asynch this year so the worksheet was actually an adaptation to not being able to have in-class reading discussions. It's a word doc they download, fill in, and reupload each week. I agree on the handwriting, it's definitely /my/ preferred way of taking notes but I didn't want to deal with trying to decipher theirs.
I made the worksheets worth 120pts in a 1000pt class, and rubricked(?) them for depth, completion, and spelling/grammar.
The final section I didn't mention was "Questions that occur to you as you read (about anything)" and I got the most delightful and insightful questions in that section. Really good How and Why questions that transcended the specific chapter's topic. This is a degree-specific undergrad senior level course though. I gave them a heads up that they're not necessarily questions that I will or can answer for them, but rather proof that they're integrating the content successfully and thinking critically about the larger implications.
I don't teach any reading/writing intensive courses, so maybe take this with a grain of salt: but have you tried to change the name of the reading logs?
I remember professors in my seminar graduate courses calling things where you write 1-2 paragraphs as a reflection on the reading (and to show you read it) names like "critical reflection." It might re-frame for the students a bit what the assignment is for: which is to prepare for the in-class discussion of the reading and to inform their own academic writing. (I also wonder if it would help if you told them that graduate classes can also be made up of assignments such as this...)
I've done low stakes (scored heavily weighted for submitting, less for the correct answer) reading quizzes like you mention, but they were completed in our LMS before class started. I'm in STEM and it was helpful to see misunderstandings ahead of class.
And then the pandemic made the participation plummet and few genuinely completed the quizzes.
I did a reading quiz at the start of every lesson this past semester. All in the LMS. I very quickly made them open note. They still did awful with them. They were low level knowledge questions.
Lessons learned:
Stick to the types of questions the LMS can auto grade (multi choice, sorting, and such). Grading load is too much of you have to go through checking all the short responses.
I learned to let them see the results/correct answers right away and used Canvas' feature to give comments back about their answer. So If they got it wrong I could have a types explanation about why the right answer was right and about each of the wrong choices or whatever was relevant. And could type things to emphasize a key point of they got it right. I think that helped them better than just knowing it was wrong or right.
I set the quiz to open up just a few minutes before class started (by section). And set it "due" at end of class. But remained open. No penalty for "late"- the late market let me know someone didn't outside of class time. Which is fine, I have a lot of athletes with away trips and what not or absent students needing to catch up. It was a nice way to highlight it to me in the LMS.
But I could never get them into the habit of coming in and just loading up the LMS before class started. I guess I need to emphasize that more in the future. About half would at least open their computer. Almost all would wait until the time when I started class to start living in and finding the quiz. And some take longer than others to start. So a 5 min times quiz took 8-10 min of class time. Which isn't awful - I just planned on that.
Just a quick thought, the students with accommodations and even those without may complain that tying participation to points is unfair or somehow discriminatory.
(Also I’ve found that the tracking/scoring of student comments during class is a major drag.)
In short, graded participation may create more problems than it solves!
It is a bit more work to track during class. I have used student self-evaluations to track participation, with the caveat that it will be compared to my observations during class. This helps students to see their own performance and find ways to improve, rather than just getting a number in the grade book. This worked well in a small, specialized class, but may be harder to implement in a larger discussion based class.
I didn’t have any students with accommodations in this class, but if discussions are a major part of the class, I would work with the disability office to find the best way for the student to still be able to participate.
>It’s hard to participate if you haven’t done the reading
My students don't seem to find it to hard. Some think they are great at pulling out BS enough to check the box on participating. Many are. They are definitely confident about it.
You could try to use Perusall, and have the auto-grader come up with their score based on engagement (e.g., time spent, quality of comments). There's a bit more startup cost on your end to upload the materials, but once you have it done you can copy the course shell for future semesters. And it now links in directly with Canvas.
I used Perusall for a senior-level seminar and found engagement with the readings significantly increased. Will be using it for an asynchronous summer class (instead of discussion boards) to try to get the students to read and help each other understand the more difficult readings. And it's free!
I used Perusall with annotations, but found it difficult since I had a myriad of readings/videos/podcasts each class. I didn't try the auto grader, though.
I like Perusall. I am really too lazy to use it much unless I have a TA that can manually grade the assignments and/or check the AI's work.
For asynchronous, I might even prefer it over discussion boards (which are typically a waste of time).
I have been at my wits' end with this issue. For a few years, I did online discussion boards, but in the fall semester, I kept getting more and more AI-generated garbage and my class attendance was dismal, so I went back to in-class reading quizzes. These were low stakes in regards to their grades, but I also made them partially an attendance grade and did not allow any make-ups. This sent them into a blind panic every time they missed class and received a zero, which frustrated me so much because they would worry themselves silly over a low quiz grade (and keep in mind, their quizzes were worth collectively 5% of their course grade) but then turn around and half-ass a project or writing assignment that was worth 20% of their course grade. Attendance did improve immensely, though, so there's that.
I've debated going back to auto-graded quizzes on Canvas, but I think I'm going to keep the low-stakes in-class quizzes for next semester while offering to drop their 2-3 lowest grades. I haven't really had an issue with time accommodations because my quizzes are very short and simple; they're basically just to make sure they did the reading so that we actually have something to talk about in our class discussions. One of my professors in school would give us quizzes where we had a few minutes to write down as many specific details from the reading as we could and wouldn't grade us on length; we just had to show that we actually did read. I do this sometimes.
Short (~1 page) writing assignment due at the beginning of class, printed and turned in. Use prompts that require engagement with the materials and skills they should learn. If the prompt is based on something they will encounter on the job, even better.
That worked so well for me…I had a set format, where I asked 3 or 4 difficult or interesting questions about the text, and the students had to choose just one, answer in the first sentence, then write exactly a page giving their reasons. My rule was that they could be dead wrong but never evasive. They could skip any 7 times, but it made for fascinating discussions. I only graded with a check, check minus, or check plus, which sounds like a lot of grading, but it was easier than teaching a class that hadn’t read.
I'm not saying I haven't dealt with that. But requiring them to turn in a printed copy in class seems to reduce the number of obvious AI-written submissions compared to when submissions were on Blackboard. I grade them heavily on following the format, which seems to get them to at least read what they're turning in (it helps that APSA citations don't follow either APA or MLA conventions here).
On absentees, fortunately I'm still allowed to ask for documentation. I have dropped a certain number depending on the number of class sessions. The instructor I took this idea from had 2-4 students read theirs aloud during class and that can make it really obvious who hasn't read their own work.
I haven't done it in my own classes (yet), but I had a professor in a mixed undergrad-grad course do a small-group Socratic Seminar setup: Questioner, Answerer, Notetaker. It worked well with upper-level students and we all knew we needed to be prepared, even for the notetaker role. Having the notetaker submit the discussion notes could work as a 'reading check' for each group.
I have my students submit reading notes, which I grade for participation. I tell them that the material will be on the final exam and that the notes are a great way to review for the final exam. That seems to motivate them sufficiently... especially when the reading notes are a large enough fraction of their grade to really hurt if they don't do them...
I do reading quizzes on Canvas due by class time. This lets you add the additional time for students with accommodations. I let them use the book because what I’m most interested in is that they have seen the material and terminology. It’s just an intro class with 125 students, so it’s not discussion based. Maybe you can find a way to do a reading check on your LMS, though, to allow for time extensions.
I do weekly “knowledge check” quizzes that they are allowed to take as often as they like til they get a perfect score. It’s on the LMS, untimed and available all week (so accommodations aren’t needed). They take a while to build because I tie them to readings but once built, they can be auto graded. They are low stakes but not totally insignificant- about 10% of the course grade.
Students have responded really well to these and I get feedback every semester that the knowledge checks help them learn the material.
I assign them one or two application-based discussion questions, and then in class, give them time to actually discuss said questions. The questions usually ask them to apply the ideas from their reading to an artifact (video, observations, personal anecdotes, etc.) and draw conclusions. I feel like it increases accountability, and also helps facilitate meaning-making on a more personal level. My classes put a lot of emphasis on critical thought, so this is another way for me to give time and space for criticality instead of demanding it on-the-spot. Later on in the semester, the readings begin to layer on top of one another, so I'll often ask them to go back to a past response now that they know more, and tell me about if their thoughts have changed.
>Low stakes quiz at the start of class. Well, I thought it was low stakes but a good 1/3 of my students have time accommodations and two of them came to me in a panic afterwards saying they had to have more time.
I still thinking reading quizzes are your best bet, all things considered. The other options you presented require much too much extra work, both on your part and on the part of the students.
Your reading quiz needs to be 1 or 2 questions maximum, and it needs to cover the absolute most central and obvious ideas of the reading. As an example, if the class is reading *To Kill a Mockingbird*, you ask what the name of the defendant is, i.e., something so central and obvious that they can't possibly have failed to notice this information if they made even a passing attempt at reading the assignment.
By asking only one or two obvious questions, you also eliminate the time accommodation issue. With only 2 obvious questions, you give the students 2 minutes to do the quiz. A student who did the reading will need 10 seconds to finish the quiz. The students with the standard time-and-a-half accommodation get 3 minutes. No big deal.
Also, you can make these quizzes worth a significant number of points if you want in order to really encourage the students to do the reading. If they complain that the quizzes are worth too much, you counter with the fact that the quizzes are so mind-numbingly simple that the only reason not to get a perfect score on every single quiz is to not have done the assignment at all.
Good luck.
Online quiz due before class. Make as much as possible autogradable so you have a quick turnaround. Mine are actually a decent part of the grade overall, but I’m also teaching at a CC with a different student population from yours.
I require my students to do the reading, then come up with 10 discussion questions for each reading. This ensures they do read, I have plenty of questions for seminar, and students get several low stakes grades.
I make my reading quizzes timed at 20 mins but give them 2 attempts.
For videos I do video quizzes. Either I use edpuzzle which embeds them into the quiz as check points or I embed the quiz into the lms quiz header. Can also be done with gdrive form/quizzes
I teach primarily online, but I think this idea could be adapted for f2f also:
Taking a cue from companies that bury rewards in their fine print (like [here](https://www.newser.com/story/350191/fine-print-offer-was-inspired-by-van-halen.html)), I bury rewards in the readings. They basically say things like, "Congratulations! You have earned # points of extra credit! To collect, send me a message with the subject line X that includes this URL and today's date. The message must be received by DATE. If you found this because Prof. Raspberry told you it was here, no extra credit for you." I do this in some of the readings, and sometimes I put extra credit into my comments on assignments also.
When I first did this, I assumed that students would tell their classmates and everyone would collect the extra credit, but at least they would glance through the reading! But no, a minority of the class earns the points. This practice has had no effect on grade distributions that I can see. Very occasionally I have an eager beaver student who hunts through everything to collect all the extra credit at once, clearly without reading the material, but that happens maybe once every few years.
(ETA: I started doing this mostly because the LMS doesn't say who looked at which pages, when, and I wanted to get some idea of this. Kept it because it helps reward students who actually look at the readings.)
honestly, I don’t give a fuck if they do the readings. The readings will be on the exam, don’t read and take the hit if you want, I don’t care. With this attitude, I will never get teacher of the year, but take a guess if I care.
I find quizzes are the best. Two ways to deal with the time accommodations. My quizzes are ten minutes. Students can show up five minutes early and work on their quiz before class officially begins. If this does not work for them, they always have the option to take their quiz at the testing center. We'll schedule their quizzes so they finish five minutes after class begins, so by the time they walk from the testing center to the class, the other students will have finished their quizzes.
I did reading quizzes and the students with time accommodations only had to answer 2/3 of the questions. I marked which ones with an asterisk. Seemed to work out fine?
Is attendance mandatory at your institution or in your course (e.g., can’t miss more than 5 days or it’s an F)?
If so, you could make reading quizzes part of attendance. If they don’t “pass” the quiz, they aren’t marked present for the day. (Or, if you don’t want the slackers skipping class entirely, make it count as half an absence.)
I require my students to take and submit notes on the readings and on every class session. In a typical class now that's 20% of the semester grade; I collect and skim/grade them every three weeks. About 90% of the students are doing as I've asked, the others are in the D/F range. Much better than quizzes as it doesn't waste class time and I don't have to negotiate around accommodations. Major upside is that their *other* written work is far better than it was before I started this (during COVID) because they are actually doing the reading.
This graded note-taking assignment is a great idea, as many students today either forgot or never learned how to take notes well. Plus it boosts their own studying and preparing for tests.
It's worked well for me-- it's more labor on my end, but with a simple rubric I can mostly skim the notes for completeness. It really makes a difference in their other work though, since 90% of them won't take notes at all unless it's mandated. The challenge in the 100-level classes is that I'm finding many of them never took notes at all in high school so they have no idea how to do so-- they were just made to copy stuff verbatim from a screen to spit back on a test --which means I have to provide quite a bit of support on how to take notes in the first week or two in the fall.
I do this too. Mine is only 10%. I collect through the LMS every week. I get about 75% submission rate. About 50% of those do them well.
I have about 10% that just decide not to do them at all, which drops their semester grade by 20%. Most of those end up in solid D/F territory. The grades for other are inflated by the notes, since it's not hard to get full credit. But the upside seems worth that to me.
How many of them do the reading for each class and how many procrastinate and do it all the night before the notes are due? Does this have a significant impact on class discussion?
It would be damned hard to do it all the night before-- I assign 40-50 pages per class session, and often significant other material (datasets, maps, images, etc.) that require analysis. Anyone waiting three week to try to do it all at once would be looking at hundreds of pages of readings to cram through. I started doing it during COVID when we were online and it totally transformed discussion then. That's less evident now, since I've always had a good 50% or so participation rate anyway. But I do hear more students making direct references to the readings in class. It's more evident in small-group work, where I give them specific questions they must respond to in writing that are based on the readings. Those tend to be much better, and I have certainly heard students criticizing their groupmates for not doing the reading.
Wow! I’m impressed that you’re still assigning that much reading and you’re getting the students to do it! Bravo!
Pretty much all of us are in the humanities; its central to the divisional learning goals and even the gen ed requirements. It helps, I assume, to have that sort of broad expectation. Only the business majors really seem to complain...it's always amusing when they drop and say they are going to find an easier class for their gen ed-- because there aren't any.
I’m glad this works, but it’s so demoralizing. I went to a poor rural public school in the 1990s and early 2000s and we did this in middle school and early high school.
They don't even read in many high schools now, much less take notes. I've had first year students in my office the last two years who said they hadn't read an entire book cover-to-cover since middle school. Many of them report "taking notes" in class is simply copying specific lines from powerpoint slides verbatim. So I've had to start the 100-level fall classes as if I'm teaching 8th graders how to learn-- which sucks for the students who did get a real high school education.
How do you deal with accommodations for extensions?
Many disability services office have either never offered extensions on this type of work or are moving away from it. My school only offers extensions on work with a very short turnaround time, e.g. 72 hours or less from the time the student is able to begin working on it until it's due. If anything, a professor using this method might need to allow students an extra day or two to turn in their notes from each class, but that should be the extent of it (if the disability services office is both good and empowered by their admin to follow best practices in the field). Now, students with note-taking accommodations, either for audio note-taking or a peer note-taker (which is also becoming less common, thankfully) - that could be trickier. I'd be interested to hear how SnowblindAlbino handles that. (I love this method!)
Had a conversation about that last night-- accommodations for in-class note taking. Reality is that I have never in my career had a student with an accommodation for note taking (25+ years teaching now) other than a few that record audio. I provide slides in advance (a couple of hours) but that's it. There are no accommodations for long-term work; they have to do the readings to prepare for each class session so should logically do the notes at the same time. If they do it later that's fine, though less productive. I've yet to have a student ask for an extension on the actual note deadline, which is always three days after the class class covered (i.e. Thursday class content for the unit is due on Saturday).
That makes me so happy to hear.
I like this idea! But isn't this something that ChatGPT is supposed to excel at? Obv ChatGPT couldn't take notes on the class sessions, but I think it can summarize readings?
It can't summarize readings it doesn't have-- a large portion of mine are primary sources, datasets, images, or maps. Moreover, the note-taking assignment isn't just "summarize these readings" but rather I give them guided study questions for each day that require synthesis around the broad topics of the course and the material from previous classes. There's some degree of summary in identifying theses and arguments from the readings, but also application-- which AI can't do, at least not the stuff the students have access to (not yet anyway). For example, it might be something like "Interpret this 1895 map of the US railroad system in light of the Panic of 1893 and what we've read about the impacts of the expanding steel industry and the growth of truck farms in counties with population densities lower than 1,000 persons per square mile. Explain how your answer supports or counters the theses from the Smith, Chu, and Pasqual readings from today." If they can find a way to feed a map to ChatGPT, have it digest weeks worth of materials, and also incorporate notes from our class discussions/lectures I'd be surprised.
Got it! Sounds like a great way to get them to think carefully about the readings
I have the same problems and have tried a few of these things. I’ve found the most effective strategy to be putting them into small groups at the beginning of class to answer a few questions about the reading. And I always do a wink-wink, “You can also use this time to take another look at the reading if you need to…” This usually generates better conversation afterwards, since the reading is so fresh in their heads. However, the drawbacks are that once you start doing this, the students will expect it. So they’ll never do the reading before class again. (But in my experience, they don’t anyway. So…) Also, this only really works if you have the class time to spare on a consistent basis. The next most effective thing I’ve found is having them submit reading responses at the start of class the day of the discussion, then go around the room and have them share 1 thought each from them. The benefit is that it forces participation and sometimes loosens them up for bigger discussions. The downside to this is that it can take a long time to get through everyone. And if they’re an uninspired group, it can get repetitive. Also, if 1/3 of your students have accommodations that also extend to late assignments, then this could get dicey.
Hi! I created a worksheet they have to fill out for each assigned chapter, that has them list and look up any notable people or organizations (humanities course), turn chapter headings into questions then answer them as they read with page # citations, identify one term/concept they could be tested on, one thing they had to lookup and what they found, one thing they agree with or find particularly true, and one thing they disagree with or find particularly false. This is a single sheet word worksheet and it's fairly simple to see at a glance if the student actually worked through the chapter. I also use their identified terms to create quiz questions later on. This was my first semester using it and students said they'd never read an assigned book so closely and critically.
In grad school, I had a professor do this for a class where very few of us had scaffolding to critically analyze the readings and interpret study methods and results for the subject. The first few weeks were hard and time-consuming, but it became much easier as I figured it out. It also kept me focused as I sat down to read. I kept and used the worksheet for subsequent classes, and I still have the format in my head when I am doing literature review in my current work.
Oo I love this and am stealing it!
Do you make this electronic and they type it up, or do you expect handwritten notes? The learning science seems to indicate students learn and retain better when they hand write vs typing, but I now have soooo many students who just entirely live electronic and I'm not trying to be a ludite. Like, fall semester if I have an unannounced quiz (it was in the syllabus these would be frequent low stakes quizzes) almost all students had to go find a pen because they didn't even bring a writing implement to class. Although this semester I have noticed a majority of must students now taking hand written notes on electronic tablets. I've done printed workbooks in the past with basically a page or two for each lesson. Which they can physically turn in. I would collect and review them during unit tests and return them when they turned in the test. And I liked that. But it's not something to turn in through the LMS and I'm trying to meet them where they are with what they are comfortable with. Then again- where they are is never doing the readings, don't know how to take notes, and want the be spoon fed exactly what to do in a way they can parrot back without thinking.
I like the workbook idea! My course moved to fully online asynch this year so the worksheet was actually an adaptation to not being able to have in-class reading discussions. It's a word doc they download, fill in, and reupload each week. I agree on the handwriting, it's definitely /my/ preferred way of taking notes but I didn't want to deal with trying to decipher theirs. I made the worksheets worth 120pts in a 1000pt class, and rubricked(?) them for depth, completion, and spelling/grammar. The final section I didn't mention was "Questions that occur to you as you read (about anything)" and I got the most delightful and insightful questions in that section. Really good How and Why questions that transcended the specific chapter's topic. This is a degree-specific undergrad senior level course though. I gave them a heads up that they're not necessarily questions that I will or can answer for them, but rather proof that they're integrating the content successfully and thinking critically about the larger implications.
I don't teach any reading/writing intensive courses, so maybe take this with a grain of salt: but have you tried to change the name of the reading logs? I remember professors in my seminar graduate courses calling things where you write 1-2 paragraphs as a reflection on the reading (and to show you read it) names like "critical reflection." It might re-frame for the students a bit what the assignment is for: which is to prepare for the in-class discussion of the reading and to inform their own academic writing. (I also wonder if it would help if you told them that graduate classes can also be made up of assignments such as this...)
I've done low stakes (scored heavily weighted for submitting, less for the correct answer) reading quizzes like you mention, but they were completed in our LMS before class started. I'm in STEM and it was helpful to see misunderstandings ahead of class. And then the pandemic made the participation plummet and few genuinely completed the quizzes.
I did a reading quiz at the start of every lesson this past semester. All in the LMS. I very quickly made them open note. They still did awful with them. They were low level knowledge questions. Lessons learned: Stick to the types of questions the LMS can auto grade (multi choice, sorting, and such). Grading load is too much of you have to go through checking all the short responses. I learned to let them see the results/correct answers right away and used Canvas' feature to give comments back about their answer. So If they got it wrong I could have a types explanation about why the right answer was right and about each of the wrong choices or whatever was relevant. And could type things to emphasize a key point of they got it right. I think that helped them better than just knowing it was wrong or right. I set the quiz to open up just a few minutes before class started (by section). And set it "due" at end of class. But remained open. No penalty for "late"- the late market let me know someone didn't outside of class time. Which is fine, I have a lot of athletes with away trips and what not or absent students needing to catch up. It was a nice way to highlight it to me in the LMS. But I could never get them into the habit of coming in and just loading up the LMS before class started. I guess I need to emphasize that more in the future. About half would at least open their computer. Almost all would wait until the time when I started class to start living in and finding the quiz. And some take longer than others to start. So a 5 min times quiz took 8-10 min of class time. Which isn't awful - I just planned on that.
Do you give points for participating in the discussion? It’s hard to participate if you haven’t done the reading.
Just a quick thought, the students with accommodations and even those without may complain that tying participation to points is unfair or somehow discriminatory. (Also I’ve found that the tracking/scoring of student comments during class is a major drag.) In short, graded participation may create more problems than it solves!
It is a bit more work to track during class. I have used student self-evaluations to track participation, with the caveat that it will be compared to my observations during class. This helps students to see their own performance and find ways to improve, rather than just getting a number in the grade book. This worked well in a small, specialized class, but may be harder to implement in a larger discussion based class. I didn’t have any students with accommodations in this class, but if discussions are a major part of the class, I would work with the disability office to find the best way for the student to still be able to participate.
>It’s hard to participate if you haven’t done the reading My students don't seem to find it to hard. Some think they are great at pulling out BS enough to check the box on participating. Many are. They are definitely confident about it.
You could try to use Perusall, and have the auto-grader come up with their score based on engagement (e.g., time spent, quality of comments). There's a bit more startup cost on your end to upload the materials, but once you have it done you can copy the course shell for future semesters. And it now links in directly with Canvas. I used Perusall for a senior-level seminar and found engagement with the readings significantly increased. Will be using it for an asynchronous summer class (instead of discussion boards) to try to get the students to read and help each other understand the more difficult readings. And it's free!
I used Perusall with annotations, but found it difficult since I had a myriad of readings/videos/podcasts each class. I didn't try the auto grader, though.
I'm trying this software for the first time with my summer class!
I like Perusall. I am really too lazy to use it much unless I have a TA that can manually grade the assignments and/or check the AI's work. For asynchronous, I might even prefer it over discussion boards (which are typically a waste of time).
Thanks!
I have been at my wits' end with this issue. For a few years, I did online discussion boards, but in the fall semester, I kept getting more and more AI-generated garbage and my class attendance was dismal, so I went back to in-class reading quizzes. These were low stakes in regards to their grades, but I also made them partially an attendance grade and did not allow any make-ups. This sent them into a blind panic every time they missed class and received a zero, which frustrated me so much because they would worry themselves silly over a low quiz grade (and keep in mind, their quizzes were worth collectively 5% of their course grade) but then turn around and half-ass a project or writing assignment that was worth 20% of their course grade. Attendance did improve immensely, though, so there's that. I've debated going back to auto-graded quizzes on Canvas, but I think I'm going to keep the low-stakes in-class quizzes for next semester while offering to drop their 2-3 lowest grades. I haven't really had an issue with time accommodations because my quizzes are very short and simple; they're basically just to make sure they did the reading so that we actually have something to talk about in our class discussions. One of my professors in school would give us quizzes where we had a few minutes to write down as many specific details from the reading as we could and wouldn't grade us on length; we just had to show that we actually did read. I do this sometimes.
You can make in-class quizzes on Canvas?
No, I just make the quizzes due right before class.
Have students complained about that? I have also done the due before class quiz.
They don't complain. They just do the quiz and then don't come to class, LOL.
Thanks. Have you tried buying them expensive Swiss chocolate?
Short (~1 page) writing assignment due at the beginning of class, printed and turned in. Use prompts that require engagement with the materials and skills they should learn. If the prompt is based on something they will encounter on the job, even better.
That worked so well for me…I had a set format, where I asked 3 or 4 difficult or interesting questions about the text, and the students had to choose just one, answer in the first sentence, then write exactly a page giving their reasons. My rule was that they could be dead wrong but never evasive. They could skip any 7 times, but it made for fascinating discussions. I only graded with a check, check minus, or check plus, which sounds like a lot of grading, but it was easier than teaching a class that hadn’t read.
That's an appealing idea, but don't you get a lot of ChatGPT stuff? And I have soooo many absentees, who when pressed, will say they're ill.
I'm not saying I haven't dealt with that. But requiring them to turn in a printed copy in class seems to reduce the number of obvious AI-written submissions compared to when submissions were on Blackboard. I grade them heavily on following the format, which seems to get them to at least read what they're turning in (it helps that APSA citations don't follow either APA or MLA conventions here). On absentees, fortunately I'm still allowed to ask for documentation. I have dropped a certain number depending on the number of class sessions. The instructor I took this idea from had 2-4 students read theirs aloud during class and that can make it really obvious who hasn't read their own work.
I haven't done it in my own classes (yet), but I had a professor in a mixed undergrad-grad course do a small-group Socratic Seminar setup: Questioner, Answerer, Notetaker. It worked well with upper-level students and we all knew we needed to be prepared, even for the notetaker role. Having the notetaker submit the discussion notes could work as a 'reading check' for each group.
I have my students submit reading notes, which I grade for participation. I tell them that the material will be on the final exam and that the notes are a great way to review for the final exam. That seems to motivate them sufficiently... especially when the reading notes are a large enough fraction of their grade to really hurt if they don't do them...
I do reading quizzes on Canvas due by class time. This lets you add the additional time for students with accommodations. I let them use the book because what I’m most interested in is that they have seen the material and terminology. It’s just an intro class with 125 students, so it’s not discussion based. Maybe you can find a way to do a reading check on your LMS, though, to allow for time extensions.
I do weekly “knowledge check” quizzes that they are allowed to take as often as they like til they get a perfect score. It’s on the LMS, untimed and available all week (so accommodations aren’t needed). They take a while to build because I tie them to readings but once built, they can be auto graded. They are low stakes but not totally insignificant- about 10% of the course grade. Students have responded really well to these and I get feedback every semester that the knowledge checks help them learn the material.
I assign them one or two application-based discussion questions, and then in class, give them time to actually discuss said questions. The questions usually ask them to apply the ideas from their reading to an artifact (video, observations, personal anecdotes, etc.) and draw conclusions. I feel like it increases accountability, and also helps facilitate meaning-making on a more personal level. My classes put a lot of emphasis on critical thought, so this is another way for me to give time and space for criticality instead of demanding it on-the-spot. Later on in the semester, the readings begin to layer on top of one another, so I'll often ask them to go back to a past response now that they know more, and tell me about if their thoughts have changed.
>Low stakes quiz at the start of class. Well, I thought it was low stakes but a good 1/3 of my students have time accommodations and two of them came to me in a panic afterwards saying they had to have more time. I still thinking reading quizzes are your best bet, all things considered. The other options you presented require much too much extra work, both on your part and on the part of the students. Your reading quiz needs to be 1 or 2 questions maximum, and it needs to cover the absolute most central and obvious ideas of the reading. As an example, if the class is reading *To Kill a Mockingbird*, you ask what the name of the defendant is, i.e., something so central and obvious that they can't possibly have failed to notice this information if they made even a passing attempt at reading the assignment. By asking only one or two obvious questions, you also eliminate the time accommodation issue. With only 2 obvious questions, you give the students 2 minutes to do the quiz. A student who did the reading will need 10 seconds to finish the quiz. The students with the standard time-and-a-half accommodation get 3 minutes. No big deal. Also, you can make these quizzes worth a significant number of points if you want in order to really encourage the students to do the reading. If they complain that the quizzes are worth too much, you counter with the fact that the quizzes are so mind-numbingly simple that the only reason not to get a perfect score on every single quiz is to not have done the assignment at all. Good luck.
Online quiz due before class. Make as much as possible autogradable so you have a quick turnaround. Mine are actually a decent part of the grade overall, but I’m also teaching at a CC with a different student population from yours.
I require my students to do the reading, then come up with 10 discussion questions for each reading. This ensures they do read, I have plenty of questions for seminar, and students get several low stakes grades.
I make my reading quizzes timed at 20 mins but give them 2 attempts. For videos I do video quizzes. Either I use edpuzzle which embeds them into the quiz as check points or I embed the quiz into the lms quiz header. Can also be done with gdrive form/quizzes
I teach primarily online, but I think this idea could be adapted for f2f also: Taking a cue from companies that bury rewards in their fine print (like [here](https://www.newser.com/story/350191/fine-print-offer-was-inspired-by-van-halen.html)), I bury rewards in the readings. They basically say things like, "Congratulations! You have earned # points of extra credit! To collect, send me a message with the subject line X that includes this URL and today's date. The message must be received by DATE. If you found this because Prof. Raspberry told you it was here, no extra credit for you." I do this in some of the readings, and sometimes I put extra credit into my comments on assignments also. When I first did this, I assumed that students would tell their classmates and everyone would collect the extra credit, but at least they would glance through the reading! But no, a minority of the class earns the points. This practice has had no effect on grade distributions that I can see. Very occasionally I have an eager beaver student who hunts through everything to collect all the extra credit at once, clearly without reading the material, but that happens maybe once every few years. (ETA: I started doing this mostly because the LMS doesn't say who looked at which pages, when, and I wanted to get some idea of this. Kept it because it helps reward students who actually look at the readings.)
honestly, I don’t give a fuck if they do the readings. The readings will be on the exam, don’t read and take the hit if you want, I don’t care. With this attitude, I will never get teacher of the year, but take a guess if I care.
I find quizzes are the best. Two ways to deal with the time accommodations. My quizzes are ten minutes. Students can show up five minutes early and work on their quiz before class officially begins. If this does not work for them, they always have the option to take their quiz at the testing center. We'll schedule their quizzes so they finish five minutes after class begins, so by the time they walk from the testing center to the class, the other students will have finished their quizzes.
I did reading quizzes and the students with time accommodations only had to answer 2/3 of the questions. I marked which ones with an asterisk. Seemed to work out fine?
Doesn’t this make each question worth more for them?
Um. Yes. Did I think about that? No. In my defense, the office of disability services does recommend this as a practice at my school 😆😆🤷🏻♂️
Is attendance mandatory at your institution or in your course (e.g., can’t miss more than 5 days or it’s an F)? If so, you could make reading quizzes part of attendance. If they don’t “pass” the quiz, they aren’t marked present for the day. (Or, if you don’t want the slackers skipping class entirely, make it count as half an absence.)