Teach 180: Grading Day (Day 85)

Today was the first day of midterm exams and a grading day.  In the morning, I proctored a midterm exam in English and then I worked on grading quizzes, homework and poster projects for Probability and Statistics.  I wrote a little about these projects in my Day 82 blog entry.  For about 3 hours today, I spent about 10 minutes or so reading each poster and writing detailed comments to give the students feedback.  In addition, I read all of the comments students gave each other and realized that there are some areas where I need to improve when I give this project as an assessment next year.

Here are some specific things I need to do differently:

1) Require students to use a larger font size and suggest a word limit.  Students are comfortable with writing more, but they also need to learn to communicate the same ideas while writing less.

 

2) Revisit my directions to this project to make sure it is clear that students need to include certain statistics directly on their poster.  

3) Not all students had a clear understanding of how the results of their simulation either supported a biased result or failed to support a bias result.  Although we have done simulations with dice and cards, I need to spend part of a day reviewing how simulations work in Fathom.  Next year we will review the video called Bias Project Simulation Results during class, instead of having students do this outside of class.