I started the year thinking that having all (ok let's say 90%) of my students' quizzes online would be awesome. Students would get immediate feedback and my team and I made a bank of questions so students could even retake the quiz up to 3 times and get different questions each time! We thought there was NO way that students would "fail" any quizzes, because if they did poorly they could retake it, they could even come in and get help and then retake it again. Well that's not exactly how it all went down. The majority of students would only take the quiz once regardless of their score. Other students would bomb the quiz on their first attempt and then a minute or two later they would retake it, as if their score would magically improve from a 20 to an 80. A few students did do what we thought they would do and actually learned from their mistakes and it was great. We tried each unit to go over what they SHOULD be doing to improve their scores, but it was like we were talking to the wind.
Our goal this year is to have students taking responsibility for their learning. We wanted students to be able to predict the grade they would make on their test, based on the data (their HW and quiz grades) they had collected. We haven't had any online quizzes this semester so far since we need to fix their internal motivation somehow. How do you get kids to care. Failing doesn't affect them. I can force them to come to tutorials if they fail a quiz, but then they aren't taking responsibility for their own learning.
This is so very interesting - only a handful have the internal motivation to follow through the way that we think that they should. I know that part of it is that they haven't been taught how to use the online tools to learn independently - or even to learn independently - education today isn't necessarily set up that way. So being the outlier is bound to be frustrating. Don't give up!
ReplyDelete