Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics

I mentioned at the start of the semester that I'd be trying a different approach to grading in the writing class this spring. I've finished grading the second big writing assignment and I have to say that although grading is taking just as long as it used to, I definitely notice a reduction in my level of stress about the process. There are two main things that I've changed: one, I am only assigning straight letter grades for papers (i.e., A, B, C or D, recorded as 4, 3, 2 or 1 in the Blackboard gradebook) and two, students are allowed to revise and re-submit papers as many times as they want, any time up until the last day of class, and I will use whatever grade they receive last (which will presumably be higher than where they started but only if they actually do the work). Giving straight letter grades has greatly reduced my angst about assigning the score for the overall assignment. For the most part, it's pretty easy to tell B papers from C papers but what I re...

As I gear up for teaching the writing class again this spring, I've been thinking a lot about how to make the grading more tolerable. In a Profhacker post last September, Brian Croxall summed up my own feeling about grading pretty well: "The thing that I dislike most about teaching is grading... The reason I typically don’t like grading is because my grading sessions often leave me feeling conflicted about the final scores I give students. “Is this essay an 87 (AKA a B)? Or is it an 88? How does it compare to that 84 I just read?” For personal reasons, my internal fairness meter gets really worked up by this process, and I have found that grading papers produces a bathetic (and pathetic) amount of handwringing on my part that is not productive in any which way." Croxall goes on to say that he planned to try using only straight letter grades on papers (i.e., A, B, etc. with no pluses or minuses): "...while it might be hard to know the difference between an 87...

I'm at that point in the semester/assignment cycle where I'm getting a lot of emails from students who are working on their final papers. Some will ask me in class if they can send me a draft to look over. What I generally tell them is that while I won't "pre-grade" their papers, I will certainly let them know if they are (or aren't) on the right track. This is particularly an issue with a couple of assignments where students have a tendency to mis-understand what I am asking them to do. For example, in my writing class, I ask students to write a short (400 word) proposal for a policy brief - they are not supposed to write the brief itself (which was the focus of a previous assignment where they were assigned topics), nor try to make an argument for or against a policy, but they should think about what policy topic they would want to investigate and write a proposal to convince me that such an investigation is needed. No matter how I explain it (and I have no...

I feel like I've been grading for weeks. I teach the writing class in the spring and I always know that I have to mentally prepare for all the grading. Although the class is 'only' thirty students, I've still broken up the assignments so half the class submits something at a time. The benefit to that is I only have to grade fifteen papers at a time but between first drafts (which need to be turned around in two days) and final drafts a week later, one assignment means three consecutive weeks where I constantly have something to grade. And then my data class had a midterm in the middle of that, and are about to turn in their mid-semester papers today. So I guess it isn't just 'feels like' - I have been grading for weeks! I'm not sure I know any teachers, at any level, who will say grading is their favorite part of the job, but we slog through, knowing that it's a necessary part of the job. But this Savage Minds post from Matt Thompson struck a ch...

Classes started here on Wednesday so I've been working hard the last couple weeks to re-vamp my syllabi while also trying to get at least a little bit of research work done. I'll be teaching the writing class again and instead of using SWoRD , I'm planning to have students do their peer reviews using Turnitin's PeerMark system. I used PeerMark in the fall with my Econ for Teachers class and while it doesn't have SWoRD's fancy algorithm for converting reviewing scores into grades, there are a lot of things about the interface that I like. I can still require that they give both numeric scores and qualitative comments, and I can grade those reviews plus the integration with Blackboard also means I have full control over when assignments become available, can set exact due dates and times, and can even set 'adaptive release' criteria (so, for example, I can require students to view a tutorial on giving good feedback before they can access their first set...

[The Chronicle article about the AEA session made it sound like I talked a lot about having students blog but it was really only the last few minutes of my presentation. I wasn't originally even going to talk about that at all (what I posted the other day  was all I originally planned to say) but Brad Delong had to cancel so I added more stuff. So here's what I had to say about students blogging...] I did want to take a few minutes to talk about an entirely different aspect of using blogs in the classroom and that is having students blog. I actually started blogging originally because I was considering having students blog for one of my classes and I figured the best way to learn how this blogging thing works was to do it myself. My perspective is that blogging can be a relatively easy way to get students to do more writing, which is something that has become increasing rare at my university since our classes keep getting bigger. Blogging typically isn’t something that you’...

This morning's Dilbert was perfectly timed as I was in the middle of trying to figure out the grade weights for my fall Econ for Teachers class and as usual, having a huge mental debate over how much weight to give 'participation'. A couple of Teaching Professor posts this summer hit on the same issue so it's already been at the back of my brain. In my data analysis course, participation is rolled into the team grades and that takes care of it; I've found that students have a strong tendency to 'punish' their peers for low participation by giving them low peer evaluation scores. But with the Econ for Teachers class, I do a lot of formative-type assessments that I'm not going to "grade" for content (e.g., student reactions to readings where I ask them to relate the reading to something in their own experience), so I have to decide how much credit to give students simply for completion. I want students to take those assignments seriously and th...

Just to follow up on my earlier post about grading participation : I decided that contract grading was going a bit far and instead will have a chunk of the semester grade that is based largely on completing assignments, attending class and otherwise engaging in the behaviors that should lead students to do better on their other assignments anyway. Taking a cue from Lisa Lane , I'm calling that portion "Class Contribution" and I've purposely left it vague how that portion is scored. What I say in the syllabus is that this will be determined in part by the peer evaluations (from their teams), completion of all assignments and participation in class, which I will track with their responses to clicker questions. Specifically, the syllabus says: Attendance and due dates: The team nature of this class requires you to be in class and to do your part as a member of your Team. This includes completing the individual component of Applications and submitting responses to clic...

ProfHacker had a post last week on contract grading and it's been simmering in my brain ever since. The particular contract that is discussed in the post is for a writing class and lists several things that students must do; as long as they do all the things on the list, they will get at least a B in the class. Some of the items on the list can be satisfied with participation ('meet due dates', 'complete all low stakes assignments like journal writing') while others are a little more subjective ('give thoughtful peer feedback', 'make substantive revisions') but none really has to do with the quality of a student's writing. In order to earn an A in the class, students must meet all the contract requirements for a B, plus produce 'exceptional' writing. The instructors essentially make the argument that if a student actually does everything on the list, they are likely to get a B anyway, and the contract allows both the instructors and the ...

By now, you may have heard about the biology professor at Louisiana State (Baton Rouge) who was removed from teaching an intro course where "more than 90 percent of the students... were failing or had dropped the class." The majority of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed story about it are supportive of the professor, particularly given that it seems like the administration did not even talk to her about the situation before acting. I tend to fall in the "there's got to be more to the story so I'll reserve judgment" camp but the story definitely struck a nerve with me, partly because I recently spent 30 minutes "debating" with a student about whether the last midterm was "too hard" and the whole conversation was super-frustrating. To give some background: I give three midterms and a cumulative final, plus have clicker points and Aplia assignments that make up about 20% of the final grade. I do not curve individual exams but will cu...

I came across an interesting discussion about a 19-year-old intern who was fired from The Gazette in Colorado Springs for plagiarism. There appears to be some controversy over the fact that the editor publicly named the girl in a letter to readers (explaining and apologizing for the plagiarism), with some people saying that doing so was unduly harsh because this incident will now follow her for the rest of her career. I was intrigued by this discussion for two reasons - one, it seems pretty clear to me that this was not a case of ignorance (as I have often encountered with my own students who have no idea how to paraphrase or cite correctly) and two, putting aside the offense itself, I have often struggled with how to handle situations where there are long-term repercussions for a student, repercussions that lead the overall costs to be far higher than might seem warranted for the specific situation. As an example of the latter issue, I have occasionally taught seniors who need to p...

The Teaching Professor suggests that they can and we should : Can students accurately assess their work? Most of us would say no with some conviction. But could they accurately evaluate their work under conditions that separated the grade they’d like to receive from the one they think their work deserves? A study in Great Britain found that they could. Even more surprising, the 160 students in this sample were first semester college students. The researcher asked them to estimate their grade on completed work using a 100 percentage point scale and 60 percent of them were within 10 percent of the grade given by the teacher. Equally surprising was the fact that when students were not within 10 percent, under-evaluation occurred more often than over-evaluation. Almost 60 percent under estimated their grade. ...However, other research has shown that students are quite mystified as to the purpose behind teachers’ requests to self assess. They don’t understand why the teacher who has complet...

Sorry to put it so bluntly but there is simply nothing fun about grading, on the side of either student or professor. The only exception I can think of is that I have often been amused when grading student papers, though that’s not usually a good thing for the student. But my lament today is sparked by a recent story about a professor who has been denied tenure because he failed too many of his students (we’re talking 80-90 percent got Ds and Fs). I encourage you to read the article here because the story is not straightforward. The school in question serves a significant population of under-prepared students and one interpretation is that the professor simply refused to lower his standards. Another interpretation is that he did not do enough to help his students learn what they should have learned (though there seems to be evidence that he tried). It also sounds like the administration needs to figure out what it’s really asking of its faculty and I have to wonder how any professor g...