Providing student feedback

I piloted EDU221 Online for fall 2012. All EDU courses mandate a Field Experience (FE) where students spend the required number of hours (for this class it is 30) in a K-12 classroom. This is a tedious process with multiple steps, including the acquisition of a Fingerprint Clearance Card, which is an additional cost. As a result, it is not uncommon for a student to drop a class, receive an incomplete (until they finish their FE the subsequent semester), or, worse yet, fail the class due to incompletion of the FE.

In my 16 week RDG 091 course, prior to the first group presentation, I spend one or two classes teaching students the oral and format expectations of an oral PowerPoint presentation.  In Fall, 2013, I taught an 8 week version of the RDG 091 course and found that there was limited time to extensively teach these skills prior to their first oral presentation.  I provided them the rubric ahead of time and covered the information as best I could with the time I had.  However, I was very disappointed in the results.

Economics is known for being a difficult subject, but perhaps what students dread most about the class is graphing.  There is not a lot of multiple choice questions in my class- students are expected to graph routinely on bi-weekly quizzes.  In order to support student development with their graphing abilities,  last year I introduced mini-whiteboards as a way to get students practicing graphing as a class warm-up activity, focusing material from the previous class.