8/2/2011 Tara 3rd Reading Notes

One goal within my teaching philosophy is for my students to gain strong communication skills needed for professional advancement. Luckily for me, and the development of my course syllabus, Davis provided a ton of strategies for strengthening student writing. I think her most important tip is to simply “get students in the habit of writing” (309). As Davis noted, ungraded, brief, weekly writing assignments will give students the confidence to get their ideas on paper without the anxiety of grading, while at the same time giving them the practice they need to become better writers. Another great tip in this section was to have students self asses their writing before they submit it for grading (311). Davis provided a list of self-assessment questions that will not only help the instructor evaluate the work, but will help the student in the development of his/her next writing assignment.

Davis provided a couple of interesting strategies when grading papers (325). The first strategy was to help maintain consistency in grading. Davis suggested that a teacher should only grade a few papers at a time. Does anyone have a comment or suggestion about this? The other strategy was to begin the grading process by reading all of the papers and then separating them into “four piles according a quick assessment of their quality” and then grading from there. Any comments on this strategy? Another question I had while reading this section was what teachers consider appropriate sources for student writing.

Hint for NDSU Newbies: Make sure you let your students know about the writing center in the library. It was a little jewel that helped me during my undergrad.

Academic honesty, well actually, academic dishonesty was a huge portion of the reading assignment. Both authors went into great detail about this topic for great reason – “everyone cheats” (Lang 199). I know people cheat. Still, the data presented by Lang, conducted by Donald McCabe, was pretty shocking. Lang didn’t provide many strategies on cheating prevention – maybe because a cheater is always a cheater. And let me tell you girl, that aint no lie. Hehe. Sorry. Different subject. Back to Lang. He suggested one main cheating prevention strategy, “give students lots of opportunities to do well in the course” which “reduces the rewards of cheating on any single assignment” (202). Davis, on the other hand, gave a ton of strategies that instructors can use to help ensure and promote academic honesty. To tell you the truth, I think some of these may actually help. Here are some strategies I liked the best: 1. Deeply educate and give examples on what plagiarism looks like. Just saying “properly source and don’t copy word for word” isn’t enough. Give them a homework assignment on plagiarism or have them do a tutorial; 2. Use scare tactics. Let them know the university policy and let them know they will fail and live a miserable life if caught cheating; 3. Talk about text-matching software; 4. Ensure equal access to study materials; 5. Seat students randomly during text/exam days. This is all in addition to putting NDSU policy on the syllabus and having a conversation about it on the first day of class. Overall, an instructor can only do so much to ensure and promote academic honesty. In the end, a cheate’ never changes his spots. Oops. Off topic again.

A few things I would like to talk about in class, regarding academic dishonesty include: 1. What do people think about text-matching software? Does NDSU have this? What do you feel about the concern of intellectual property of the students work and their privacy? 2. How far in the “search of cheaters” do you go, before you start looking and acting like a freak who is “out to get them.” 3. On p. 359, Davis was clear about “not automatically assigning an F in the course” what do others think? Isn’t that NDSU’s policy?

Testing and grading was the next big topic for both authors. Grading scares the crap out of me. I would prefer handing out puppies for a job well done. The one thing I do believe is that students should be graded under “standard referenced grading, where a letter grade reflects a student’s level of achievement against a specified standard or benchmark” (Davis 44). Grading under the norm-referenced model doesn’t make sense to me. I was surprised by how strongly Lang felt about curving. He seems to be pretty open about many things, but he was very direct in his thoughts when he said “The one reason faculty members continue to grade on a curve in my experience is that it allows them to boost up student grades when their test are so hard that no one does well, or it helps them keep the grades down when everyone is doing well” (141). Does anyone is class believe in norm-referenced grading? I would like to hear your reasoning behind it.