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...

Since the end of last spring, I've been kicking around the idea of listing my writing class as a 'hybrid' class - i.e., a class that meets partially online. There are already several weeks in the course where I 'cancel' one of the class meetings because students are working on drafts and reviews and there isn't really anything for us to talk about as a group. So instead of having class, I tell students they can come meet with me individually to discuss their writing. There are also some class days where I feel like we don't really need to be meeting, that it would be just as easy to accomplish what we are doing online. So it wouldn't be that big a stretch to formally move to a hybrid structure where we meet face-to-face once a week and the other class 'meeting' is online. My department is also in the process of developing policies for handling the development of online (including hybrid) classes. We had some discussion last year when a collea...

Last year, I wrote a lot about my experience with SWoRD , a site that facilitates peer review of writing (including generating grades from peer review scores). Although I think there are a lot of neat things about SWoRD, there were also a lot of problems and I decided not to use it for the writing class this past spring. Instead, I used Turnitin's PeerMark tool, which is integrated into my school's Blackboard system. Compared to last year, I made a few adjustments to the writing and reviewing process. The general pattern was that students would submit first drafts on Mondays, by class time; those papers would be made available to reviewers at the end of a two-hour grace period (i.e., class started at 3:30pm and papers were available to reviewers at 5:30pm so slightly late papers could still get reviewed without messing up any of the assignments) and reviews were due by class time on Wednesday (again with a two-hour grace period). Depending on the assignment, students revi...

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...

As I mentioned at the end of my last post , SWoRD does provide an infrastructure that makes it easier to have students do peer review - students can submit papers electronically, the system can randomly assign multiple anonymous reviewers, I can create specific comment prompts so reviewers must give both numeric and open-ended comments, and students can back evaluate the reviews to indicate how helpful they were (or weren't). Given that I am a firm believer in the value of the peer review process overall, I would perhaps continue to use SWoRD if there were no other options that could serve the same function. But if I'm not going to use the grades generated by SWoRD (or if I need to do a lot of work to make those grades work for me), then I do have other options. Each would require some tweaking to do exactly what I want to do but from what I can tell, they all provide some advantages over SWoRD as well. Please note that I have not yet actually used any of the three tools I ment...

I really should have gotten back to this sooner but for those who are wondering how things went with SWoRD , the peer review writing site I used with my writing class in the spring, my overall reaction is that while it might be useful for some people, I probably won't use it the next time around. For those who missed my earlier posts, I discussed the basics of SWoRD , whether SWoRD can replace instructor grading , and some first reactions to SWoRD's reviewing process (after the first assignment) back in March. I made some tweaks as the semester progressed but overall, I have to say the experience was still pretty rough. To briefly recap, SWoRD is an online peer review system where 1) students upload their papers, 2) the system randomly assigns other students to anonymously review those papers, 3) peer reviewers give both open-ended comments and numeric ratings in response to instructor-generated prompts, 4) authors 'back evaluate' their reviews, which means they give...

[If you missed them, I discussed the basics of SWoRD and whether SWoRD can replace instructor grading in earlier posts. I also have a follow-up post in August] In addition to generating a writing grade from students' numeric rubric scores, SWoRD also generates a reviewing grade. My understanding is that a student's reviewing grade is based half on that student's 'consistency' and half on the 'helpfulness' of that student's comments. The consistency score accounts for whether a student is differentiating among papers - if a student gives all high scores or all low scores, or if a student's scores differ from the other scores for the same papers, then the consistency score will be reduced (this also affects how much weight that student's scores are given in the writing score of the reviewed papers). The helpfulness score comes from 'back evaluations' that reviewees complete. The back evaluations are numeric scores on a five-point scale...

The short answer, for me, right now, is NO. However, I am not sure if that is because of an inherent problem with peer reviewing in SWoRD or it it is because of something about my assignments or my rubric. And to be fair, I have only had completed one full cycle (two drafts of a paper) in SWoRD so students are also still getting used to the system (if you missed it, I discussed the basics of SWoRD in my last post ). [Update: for my post-semester thoughts, and clarification of the grading, see my August follow-up post ] Some background: the first assignment (copy can be found here ) was for students to write a very short (300 words + graph) data summary, based on the latest BLS Unemployment Situation report. I had comment prompts and rubrics related to three general categories: economic content, the graphic and the writing. One thing I realized is that I probably had too many prompts (there were 9 total to go with the 3 rubrics) so for future assignments, I will condense them. I only...

As I mentioned , I'm using SWoRD in my writing class for econ majors. SWoRD is a site that not only facilitates peer review, it allows for student grades to actually be determined by their classmates' reviews. For each assignment, the instructor creates both open-ended comment prompts and a numeric rubric (the SWoRD template requires a 1 to 7 scale, though you can sort of get around that by skipping some of the numbers). Students submit their papers to SWoRD and once the deadline has passed, papers are assigned to peer reviewers (minimum of three, maximum of six; the creators of SWoRD strongly recommend at least five reviews if the scores will be used for grading). Everything is anonymous, as each student creates a pseudonym within the system (you just have to make sure students don't put their names in the text of their files!). I can either assign specific reviewers or have the system automatically assign them randomly. After the reviews are completed, the authors have t...

A few different people pointed me to a (not so) recent article in The Chronicle, written by a man who writes for a custom essay company (that is, he writes papers for students). It's a fascinating article - every academic definitely should read it. But while the author's story alone is scary/sad/infuriating, I found many of the comments equally fascinating. As you might expect, there's lots of debate about how to avoid/detect plagiarism and who is to blame for the existence of these essay services. One comment, #253 from thodekke, particularly caught my attention. He writes: "Speaking as an undergraduate student who has to write in many of his classes, I'm confident in saying that I'm much more knowledgable than my writing sometimes suggests. There are those who simply can't articulate thoughts on paper. When given an oral question, they can  answer it and it sounds like a doctorate level thesis. Ask them to write a paper on it and they start sounding lik...

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 ...

There was an article in Inside Higher Ed last week about the difficulty of teaching writing. Rob Weir offers some useful advice about using visualization to help students organize their thoughts and structure their papers. He concludes with this caveat: These models are strictly for students who struggle with organization. Every one of them is something that college students should have learned in high school. The models won’t add the magic that differentiates sparkling from pedestrian prose. They will not turn your students into Marlowe or even Sarah Vowell. Nor will they cure syntax errors, grammar, shallow thinking, or lack of command of the subject. What they can do is provide students with methods of imposing order upon randomness. Unfortunately for me (from this particular perspective), the students in my writing class all seem to have a decent grasp of basic organization already. The reason this is unfortunate for me is that since they are solid on basic organization, I have...

As a student, I was not a big fan of collaborative or group work when I was in college. I rarely saw the benefit and usually ended up feeling like I had to do a lot more work, since I would want to make sure that what my group did was as good as if I had just done it myself. Free-riders were annoying (since I was usually the only trying to keep my group organized and on-track) but just as bad, if not worse, were people who simply didn't do very good work. Then I'd have to figure out a way to make whatever we turned in better but without hurting their feelings (I was, um, not very diplomatic when I was younger). As a teacher, I still don't love group work and I only use it when I think there are large benefits that cannot be achieved any other way. For example, I have several assignments in my writing class where students work in pairs or teams of four, but I believe that this is necessary because they need to see that in the 'real world', writing is not usually th...

Today was one of those days where my students seemed confused but I wasn't quite sure why. This time, it wasn't confusion about content (which by now, I can usually figure out); it was confusion about an assignment. In my writing class, the students had to write short data summary reports, the first drafts of which were due today. I paired them up with a classmate ('co-author') and in class, they were to read their teammate's paper, following some guidelines designed to help them assess the writing (e.g., 'can you generate a one-sentence summary of the report?', 'circle any terms that a non-economist might need defined', etc.) and discuss how to improve each report. Then for Wednesday, they must each independently revise both papers, that is, their own and that of their partner (each student wrote on a slightly different topic, though all were related to employment in some way). In class on Wednesday, they will then compare the two versions of each ...

Last spring, I taught a writing course for economics majors for the first time. As I gear up to teach it again, I am making a bunch of changes, particularly in how I structure the peer review process. Specifically, I am not calling it peer review or evaluation and instead, am going to try to get students to see themselves as 'co-authors' for their classmates. The big reason for this is that last year, I found that when asked to 'review' their classmates' work, the majority of students did not give very helpful feedback and when asked, they said that they did not feel qualified to critique someone else's work. I am hoping that by removing the idea of 'evaluating' or 'critiquing' from the process, and calling them 'co-authors' or 'teammates' instead, that students will start to think more along the lines of 'how would I make this better if I were writing it?' However, I don't really want every assignment to be a group...

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...