Active Learning and Self-Assessment Handbook
For Phil 204: Theories of Knowledge and Reality
Fall 2005 – REVISED VERSION
© 2005 by Laura Rediehs
“The unexamined life is not
worth living.”
– Socrates (Plato’s Apology)
The grading in this course is based on
self-assessment. The primary reasons for
this are that (a) I believe that the role of the philosophy teacher should be
more interactive than evaluative, and (b) I believe that
philosophy, properly studied, should include developing one’s capacities for
self-reflection. Every branch of
philosophy requires this ability. Metaphysics
asks important questions about reality, including questions about the nature of
the human person, and the place of the human person within a larger
reality. Such questions obviously
require some self-reflection. Ethics
is the study of morality and includes questions about the meaning of life. Here too it is clear that reflecting on one’s
own experiences is helpful in learning and evaluating ethical theories. Epistemology is the study of the
nature and purposes of knowledge, and so epistemological inquiry is also an
activity that is necessarily somewhat self-reflective (thinking about thinking,
knowing about knowing, inquiring about inquiry, learning
about learning).
Therefore, to further my own teaching goals of
encouraging character development and self-reflective, independent thinking,
the grading in this course will be based on self-assessment. That means that you will reflect on your work
throughout the course and determine your grades for the graded assignments in
the course. This system of grading helps
provide the space for each of you to set your own learning goals, and for each
of you to approach the course in the way that is most meaningful to you.
Letting you determine your own grades is not a relinquishment of my responsibility to give you feedback, to work with you in determining goals for the course, or to provide structure and guidance so that you may learn effective self-evaluation. I will continue to do everything that professors do when they determine grades, except for one thing: I will not write numerical grades on your assignments. Instead, I will let you determine these grades.
Although you get to determine your grades, to ensure
fairness and to help maintain the integrity of this system of grading, there
are certain parameters and restrictions I must set up in advance. If you have shown evidence of engaging
thoughtfully in the process throughout the course, and have taken all course
requirements seriously, I do hope to honor your self-assessed grade and allow
that grade to be the grade you receive for the course. However, I reserve the right to adjust the
self-assessed grades of students who fail to complete all of the assignments,
who turn in assignments late, who have missed too many classes (please see the
attendance policy in your syllabus), or who have not properly fulfilled the
requirements of the self-assessment process.
Other ways I structure the self-assessment process:
1. I will give a framework for
weighting the different requirements of the course.
2. Certain assignments, if
skipped or done extremely poorly, will result in failure of the course. Please note that completing the final paper
is absolutely required to pass the course.
3. Other assignments, if
skipped or done extremely poorly, will reduce the highest possible grade you
can attain. For example, if you skip a
written assignment worth 25% of the grade, your grade will be reduced by 25%.
4. You must keep an ongoing
self-assessment logbook. When you turn
in your final grade, you must also turn in your logbook. Students who fail to turn in a final grade
plus rationale by the final deadline at the end of the course will receive a
zero in the course; students who do turn in a grade but fail to turn in a
complete logbook are likely to receive an incomplete. If your logbook does not adhere to the
requirements set forth, I reserve the right to reconcile inconsistencies and/or
supply missing information, recomputing your final
grade accordingly.
One of the most important goals of self-assessment is to free you to engage in studying the material in this course in the way that is most meaningful to you and most relevant to your current level of philosophical/educational development. Related to this goal is the goal of helping you to develop into a good, active learner. The better you become at taking responsibility for your own education, the better you also become at taking responsibility for your life. One of the most important purposes of a liberal arts education is to increase your awareness and understanding of what the world is like and who you are in it, in order to empower you to make wise decisions and live your life well.
While I still maintain something of an evaluative role, in self-assessment grading my role becomes more interactive than evaluative, which I feel is more appropriate for philosophical education. There are times when my evaluative feedback offers helpful reality checks, but much of the feedback I will offer is not necessarily evaluative but dialogic or conversational – responses to your ideas intended not necessarily to criticize but to invite you to expand, extend, or refine your ideas further. In philosophical education (as well as perhaps other kinds of education too), the lines between “students” and “teachers” are frequently blurred – we all learn from and teach each other.
I realize that self-assessment is new for many of you; even those who have participated in self-assessment before have probably participated in a process somewhat different from this one. I realize that you are learning this process as we go, and therefore I will try to offer helpful feedback at strategic moments to help you in your learning. Feel free to come talk with me, or raise questions in class about this process if you have questions or concerns. Many students experience some anxiety the first time they are asked to participate in a self-assessment process – this is normal and healthy. But if you are troubled by your anxiety, do not hesitate to talk with me, and I will do my best to offer the appropriate reassurances!
I will still be reading and commenting on all of your written assignments, observing your participation in class, and monitoring your overall progress, because I do believe that giving you feedback constitutes an important part of my role as teacher.
Hopefully, after reading the above, you are excited and
think that it will be fun to engage in this way in your educational
process. But you might still be
especially anxious about the “assigning grades” part. Welcome to the club. Many instructors,
believe it or not, struggle with this as well.
There are so many things going on in education that applying a single
numerical scale to all that happens within a semester is a daunting task. How does it all get boiled down to a single
number for each student?
Furthermore,
St. Lawrence has recently changed its grading system, as most of you probably
know. Instead of giving final grades on
the 4.0 scale in 0.5 intervals, now the grades will be reported on the 0.25
intervals: i.e., the reported grades are
4.0, 3.75, 3.5, 3.25, 3.0, 2.75, 2.5, 2.25, 2.0, 1.75, 1.5, 1.25, 1.0, 0. It is important to keep in mind that this
scale is actually modified from a traditional A, B, C, D, F system, because
those systems are often converted to numerical values where A = 4.0, B = 3.0, C
= 2.0, D = 1.0, and F = 0. So, in
assessing grades, it is best to start from these basic whole numbers, noting
that they mean: 4.0=Excellent, 3.0=Good,
2.0=Satisfactory, 1.0=Lowest Passing Grade, and
0=Failure.
Some
important factors to notice about St. Lawrence grading:
·
Students need a
2.0 grade point average in order to graduate.
(The grade point average (or GPA) is the average of all of your
grades.) St. Lawrence defines the 2.0 as
“Satisfactory.”
·
1.0 is still,
however, a passing grade. (It is defined
as “Lowest Passing Grade.”) This means
that you would get credit for passing a course in which you got a 1.0, but you
would need to do well enough in other courses to pull your GPA back up to 2.0
overall. The same would apply for the
grades of 1.25, 1.5, and 1.75.
·
A 3.0 is defined
as “Good.” The difference between
“Satisfactory” and “Good” is that to do satisfactory work on an assignment, you
have to have fulfilled most of what the assignment requires, without any really
major mistakes. For an assignment to be
rated as “Good,” you have to have fulfilled all of what the assignment
requires, without any actual mistakes.
·
For grades above
3.0, you have to have done a truly excellent job. This may be different from the expectations
in high school, where simply fulfilling the requirements of the assignment may
have been enough to earn you an A. What
does “excellence” mean? It means doing
more than mechanically fulfilling what was expected – it means going above and
beyond in some way, adding some original thinking, or making insightful
connections with other material we have studied in the course, or showing that
you understand and appreciate the significance of the assignment beyond this
course.
If
you would like further help in understanding the “in-between” intervals, you
might want to think about them this way:
·
the “.75” grades are like “minus” grades. For example, 3.75 is
like an A-, 2.75 is like a B-, 1.75 is like a C-.
·
The “.25” grades
are like “plus” grades. 3.25 is like a
B+, 2.25 is like a C+, and 1.25 is like a D+.
·
Then the “0.5”
grades are like borderline grades. 3.5
is like A/B (or A-/B+), etc.
There
is more that could be said, but this is a start. Begin by asking yourself: “Does my work on this assignment earn at
least a 3.0 – did it fulfill every part of the assignment well?” If you are aware that it’s not all the way
there, go down proportionally. If you
think it does fulfill the assignment in a solid but not spectacular way, rest
content with a 3.0. If you think it did
fulfill the assignment well, but also went above and beyond in some way, then
go up proportionally.
In keeping track of your grades, you will keep a self-assessment logbook that you will turn in at the end of the course. Please type out your logbook, staple the pages together (no need for fancy binders), and make sure your name is on all portions of it. Here are the contents of your logbook:
Beginning of
Course:
For Each Major
Graded Assignment in the Course (Papers, Presentations):
At Mid-Term:
End of Course:
Throughout
the course, I will be happy to talk with you individually or as a class, as
needed, to share ideas about criteria and strategies for responsible
self-evaluation. What follows are some
general tips.
Ø
For simplicity of computation, each grade should be given on the 4.0
scale. (Converting back and forth
between the 4.0 scale and 100 point scales is
tricky: there are differing opinions
about how exactly to correlate these scales.
If you employ a different scale and I disagree with how you convert it
to the 4.0 scale in the end, I am likely to rescale and recompute
your grade at the end.)
Ø
For individual assignments, you do not necessarily have to limit
yourself to the .25 intervals. That is,
you can give yourself a grade of 2.8 if you feel your work on a particular
assignment is actually a little better than a 2.75 but not quite approaching a
3.0 level, for example.
Ø
In most cases, grading criteria can be lifted out of how the assignment
is written. Addressing all aspects of
the assignment is generally regarded as a minimum for receiving a pretty good
passing grade (2.0 or higher). It is a
good idea to make sure to make connections between your narrative comments and
the grading criteria you have identified.
Ø
For the philosophical notebooks, questions, class minutes, discussion
board participation, and classroom participation, completeness and regular attendance/participation counts for a
lot. But quality is also important—you should be double-checking the
accuracy of your reading notes by comparing your conclusions with what you
learn in class (plus do not forget that you can talk with me during office
hours if there are additional questions you have that did not get addressed in
class). Quality discussion participation
(both in class and on the discussion board) means that you share your insights
and questions, listen attentively to what others have to say, respond
respectfully to the others in the class, and are sincerely engaged in the
process of learning (this latter point being something only you are qualified
to evaluate!)
Ø
It is most important throughout the course to be using the assignments
in a way that helps you to learn.
Occasionally, you may want to try
to make certain kinds of mistakes just to see where the limits really are—try a
radical interpretation or critique of a philosopher’s idea, launch an idea of
your own that you are not sure about but need to test in written (or spoken)
dialogue, experiment with modes of writing, etc. While the traditional grading system
encourages you to play it safe, taking on the tasks that you find the easiest,
self-assessment allows you to be bolder and more creative in your approach,
because you then get to be the final judge of the learning value of how you
approached assignments. This does not
mean that anything goes, but
controlled experiments within the spirit of the assignments are very much
encouraged. At the end of the day, I
will be convinced that your work was a sincere engagement in learning if I see
in your self-assessment log good reasons for why you decided to push the limits
on certain assignments!
Ø
The final computation of your grade proceeds at first by simple number
crunching. How do you average grades
when the weightings of each element of the course are different? Simple:
you take the grade you give each item and multiply it by the percent
weight (e.g., if the assignment is worth 15% of the grade, then multiply the
grade by .15), and add these numbers together.
The result will be your preliminary estimate of your course grade. A worksheet is provided on the ANGEL system
for doing the final number-crunching.
Ø The final paper is not to be
graded and averaged in. You should regard it as a comprehensive, integrative
final. Back in the days when I graded, I graded the final paper on the HP, P,
LP, NC scale. An HP could raise one’s
computed grade at the end, and an LP could lower it, especially if the computed
grade were near a borderline. (See rounding grades, below). The raising and lowering of grades would be
up or down 0.25. Especially if you have
been boldly seeking LPs early in the course, and have been doing so wisely in a
way that has enabled you to learn a lot, and you feel you have succeeded in
pulling it all together for the final paper, such that you write one that you
think incorporates all of the elements of a truly excellent philosophy paper,
you may be justified in letting your improvement in the course count favorably
in your final assessment of your grade.
a) Attendance is how many times you come
to class. You get credit for coming to
class as long as you are physically present, awake, and look attentive.
b) Participation requires attendance but is
not the same thing. It requires doing
more than just coming to class, staying awake, and looking attentive. It minimally requires being attentive (not merely looking
attentive), submitting good, substantive questions prior to each class, and
participating as assigned in small group discussions. Optimally, it also includes productive
contributions during whole-class discussions.
For
discussion board grading, I use an “objective” quantitative system as a
reality-check on your self-assessed grade.
Again, additional qualitative information provided by your own
reflections is also important.
Number
of Contributions (submitted on time) |
Grade |
5 |
4.0 |
4 |
3.5 |
3 |
3.0 |
2 |
2.0 |
1 |
1.0 |
0 |
0 |
Number
of Contributions (submitted
on time) |
Grade |
7 |
4.0 |
6 |
3.5 |
5 |
3.0 |
4 |
2.5 |
3 |
2.0 |
2 |
1.5 |
1 |
1.0 |
0 |
0 |
Average the two grades.
A
note about late work: turning in work
late is hard on the timing of events in the course. Therefore, it is important for you to try
your hardest to turn everything in on time.
I reserve the right to refuse to accept papers that are excessively
late, and count the grades for them as NC.
“Excessively late” usually means I will not accept papers after I have
turned them back to the rest of the class.
In the case of assignments to be peer-reviewed, being late at all
presents terrible and perhaps insurmountable logistical problems, so, out of
courtesy to your peers, have them ready on time.
This
table (copied from your syllabus) shows how much each graded component of the
course is weighted.
Assignment |
% Grading Weight (each) |
% Grading Weight (total) |
Class
Preparation and Participation (philosophical notebooks, submitting questions,
taking class minutes, participating in class discussions, and, if you had to
miss any classes, learning what you missed and submitting a written response
to missed classes) |
15 |
15 |
Discussion
Forum Participation (including responding to all Reflection Questions) |
15 |
15 |
First
paper |
25 |
25 |
First
peer review |
10 |
10 |
ANGEL
Dialogue (in lieu of second paper) |
25 |
25 |
Philosophy
Talk Show |
10 |
10 |
Final
Paper |
Not
graded, but absolutely required to pass course |
|
Formula
for Computing Final Grade:
(All
grades plugged into this formula should be grades on the 4.0 scale.)
(Class
Preparation & Participation Grade x .15) + (Discussion Forum Grade x .15) +
(First Paper x .25) + (Peer Review x .10) + (ANGEL Dialogue x .25) + (Talk Show
x .10) = Final Course Grade.
Then
reflect on whether you think that the quality of your work on your final paper
justifies adjusting this computed grade.
The formula for rounding grades
to the nearest 0.25 interval is to take the raw grade, multiply by 4, round to
the nearest whole number, and then divide by 4.
If
you have further questions about self-assessment, please do not hesitate to
ask. Remember that the main point
throughout the course is to use the course to further your own educational
goals, to strengthen your inner motivation, and to develop good habits of
active learning. Learning honest
self-reflection is a valuable complement to these goals, but those substantive
goals are what are of primary importance.
I hope you enjoy and appreciate this opportunity to further these kinds
of goals in your studies.
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