{"id":226,"date":"2009-05-25T11:16:51","date_gmt":"2009-05-25T19:16:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=226"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:23:36","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:23:36","slug":"leading-horses-notes-on-helping-failing-and-peeking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2009\/05\/leading-horses-notes-on-helping-failing-and-peeking\/","title":{"rendered":"Leading Horses: notes on helping, failing and peeking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I do some shocking things to help my students succeed:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Questions in advance: all multiple-choice quiz questions are available in advance, with two tries to check your score.<br \/>\n<em> But, I have students who don&#8217;t use them.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Late work accepted: All quizzes and assignments are accepted up to a week late for partial credit. For on-site classes, homework may be turned in as a replacement for the quiz for partial credit.<br \/>\n<em> But, I have students who don&#8217;t avail themselves of this and get 0 points.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Samples posted: each quiz is followed by real-life examples from the exams of current students.<br \/>\n<em> But, I have students who don&#8217;t read them.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Help available: each class features both an extensive FAQ and a Help forum open to all.<br \/>\n<em> But, I have students who write things like &#8220;I couldn&#8217;t find this cartoon at the website, so I can&#8217;t answer the question&#8221;.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Access to me: via IM, email, Messages, etc.<br \/>\n<em> But, I have students who don&#8217;t contact me all semester.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Shout-outs and encouragement: in every discussion forum, I summarize and note the contributions of particular individuals.<br \/>\n<em> But, I have students who don&#8217;t read my posts.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Self-assessments and rubrics: instead of just assigning participation points, students write self-assessments comparing their own performance to that of the rubric, on which I base my grade.<br \/>\n<em> But, I have students who don&#8217;t do it, or do it as if there were no rubric, or tell me what they think they should get in the class because of all the effort they feel they put into it.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So, some of them fail. I figure that among the various rights I ascribe to them is the right to fail. I&#8217;m trying to get past the point where I think every failure of theirs is because I did something wrong.<\/p>\n<table  class=\" table table-hover\" border=\"0\" align=\"right\">\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/lisahistory.net\/images\/horsetowater.jpg?w=648\" alt=\"leading horse\" hspace=\"15\" vspace=\"15\" align=\"right\" \/><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td style=\"text-align:right;\"><span><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/neuralvibrance\/2466104783\/\" target=\"_blank\"><br \/>\n<\/a><\/em><\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/neuralvibrance\/2466104783\/\" target=\"_blank\"><em><\/em><\/a><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/neuralvibrance\/2466104783\/\" target=\"_blank\">Flickr photo by NeuralVibrance<\/a><\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<p>It&#8217;s interesting to note that, over twenty years, I have experimented with many different methods, from the bizarrely open to the strict instructivist. I&#8217;ve done this both for myself, because I take pride in my work, and to increase student success. BUT the result in terms of assessments and drop-out rate is almost invariable. My retention and &#8220;success&#8221; statistics rarely shift over the long term, but my more open methods have created less stress for me and certainly more opportunities for students, if they take advantage of them.<\/p>\n<p>Last week, an instructor wrote me, distressed because students who weren&#8217;t enrolled till fall were getting into this semester&#8217;s course to look at the tests (Moodle has a self-enrollment system). I discovered in <a href=\"http:\/\/docs.moodle.org\/en\/Enrolment_key\" target=\"_blank\">the documentation<\/a> that you can change your &#8220;enrolment key&#8221; to prevent this, and currently enrolled students won&#8217;t be affected, so I sent out a message to all Moodlers. Then I started to go through this semester&#8217;s courses to put in a code on all my classes (I don&#8217;t use one).<\/p>\n<p>Then it occurred to me. As with all the other things I&#8217;ve done, it won&#8217;t make much difference. If a student from next semester sees the tests, they will face two sections. One is multiple-choice, where I already give the questions in advance anyone, and the other is essay, which I won&#8217;t grade, obviously. If they look at the sample essays I&#8217;ve posted, then try to copy and paste them, I&#8217;ll probably recognize them because they are the ones I selected as examples. If they use the samples to create their own, they&#8217;ll learn something anyway. I took the enrollment keys back off.<\/p>\n<p>I was told once about a professor who had a huge test bank of multiple-choice questions, which he vigorously protected. He figured, as many do, that prevention of cheating could best be accomplished by having a huge test bank so students rarely got the same questions. The very day he got up to 1,000 questions in the test bank, he found a printed copy of all of the questions left behind at a student&#8217;s desk. At first he was angry. Then it occurred to him that if a student actually studied all 1,000 questions, they were learning anyway, so what the heck? I remember that story all the time to remind me what I&#8217;m trying to do, whether the students choose to fail or succeed, sideways or otherwise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I do some shocking things to help my students succeed: Questions in advance: all multiple-choice quiz questions are available in advance, with two tries to check your score. But, I have students who don&#8217;t use them. Late work accepted: All quizzes and assignments are accepted up to a week late for partial credit. For on-site [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32,6,10,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cmslms","category-musings","category-online-teaching","category-pedagogy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10051,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions\/10051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}