Topic rankings and grades

In my history class I ask students to rank the topics a class covers three times: on the first day, at the midterm, and on the last day of class. I wanted to see if the rate of change for students was correlated at all with their course grades. For this exercise I did not look at the first ranking, as 23 of the 40 who were there chose the option "I don't know enough yet."

My spring 2012 class was on U.S. history from 1945 to the present, and I asked the class to rank the seven decades we covered ('40s through the '00s). A total of 27 students ranked all seven decades on both the midterm and at the end of class, and I divided them into three groups:

1. Minor changes (from 0 to 3 topic rankings changed)
   The 7 who were in this group had a GPA of 3.14.
2. Moderage changes (4 or 5 topic rankings changed)
   The 11 who were in this group had a GPA of 2.55.
3. Major changes (6 or all 7 topic rankings changed)
   The 9 who were in this group had a GPA of 2.11.

So what do my numbers mean? Maybe the students who already know their history can spend their class time focused on doing well, whereas the others are figuring out what they feel is important and not as concentrated on assignments. This question I am very interested in examining again.

Grades and handing in tests

Whenever I have taken an in-class exam I always wondered if there was a difference in the exam grade between those who turned in the test immediately and those who took their time. At various times in my student career I have had desperate exams and ones I felt better about, and I could never figure out for me if completing a test earlier or later was better. Now that I am a professor I can see if there is any effect on my students.

Permission numbers and grades

How do students who add a class via a permission number do compared to those who were enrolled on the first day of class? In my face-to-face classes, students do not receive a permission number from me until after the class starts. Students are dropped when they miss a certain number of class sessions. On my online classes, students receive a permission number from me via email once they are available to me. I do not hold a face-to-face orientation.

Time period for short answers

Remind students to provide a time period when they identify a term on an exam. Too many students did not demonstrate some awareness of when an event occurred or the time period of a trend and lost points because of that.

Quiz score and time spent on quiz

I am disappointed at how my students are doing on their reading quizzes this semester. I use the quizzes to motivate them to get the reading done before we meet in class, as I want them to have a broad familiarity with the chapter before I lecture or we do a group activity or watch a video that is more focused. Each quiz has 10 questions that I wrote, and I tried to make some questions easy and some questions that required some critical thinking.

The average score did not change when I increased the time limit after the first three quizzes:

Quiz	Time Limit	Attempts	Average
1	10 mins.	31	62.9%
2	10 mins.	43	48.8%
3	10 mins.	41	47.8%
4	20 mins.	41	55.6%
5	20 mins.	37	56.8%
6	20 mins.	34	48.8%
7	20 mins.	35	54.6%

Quiz attempts with a 10-minute limit averaged 53.17% and those with a 20-minute limit averaged 53.95%.

Then I thought I might look at how much time each student spent on the quiz and see if I could correlate that with a score but I discovered nothing interesting there. I had to do some heavy data massaging (create a report in D2L that included the time per attempt and then use Word and Excel to strip out all of the questions and answers for each attempt), and I discovered the following for chapter 1:

Score	Count	Average Time
8	5	6.2 mins.
7	8	6 mins.
6	7	6.4 mins.
5	8	6.6 mins.

One student each scored 3 and 4 points on the quiz.

Better oral history

After reading the first half of the oral history research papers my students did I realize I need to structure the assignment better. About 80% of the sources they use are not primary (except the interview). The stories are interesting and at times touching, so they seem able to find reliable informants. Their other sources tend to me the textbook and/or web sites and material published recently. For the future I need some additional guidelines:

• Pick the last date for an event, maybe five or six years ago
• Approve the informant (use this to find out what the connection is between the informant and the event)
• Have an assignment focused on finding an appropriate primary source

For one class a few years ago I made each step in writing a paper a separate assignment (topic, research, thesis, outline, final draft); I might have to do that again.

Individual study guides for final exam

On the final exam I have a comprehensive essay question, and throughout the semester I had students do some work in class and hand it in to me. It was solely for the purpose of role taking, but the questions were related to in-class activities. For the final exam I returned a packet of each student's handwritten work.

So far so good, but since several of the activities were group ones and each group turned in a single sheet of paper, I ended up having to photocopy many of the papers several times. It took a little while and I am not sure how much benefit the students got, so for next semester I need to find a more efficient way to develop a learning portfolio from in-class activities.