Mid-Semester Evaluations

Now that I’m in Week 7.5, or halfway through the semester, it’s perhaps appropriate to reflect on how my class has been going. It’s been a while since I blogged about my class. First, my time spent on the class has been steadily decreasing to something more manageable. In the month of February I averaged 17.5 hours per week, including class time. Not quite my target 15 hours a week, but certainly better than January. In March so far, I’m so far averaging close to 15, but only half the month has gone by. (In a typical course my time spent is 10 hours per week, which incidentally is also what I expect of my students.)

My seventh homework set was asking the students a set of questions to find out how the class is going for them so far. Many of the students seem to be more settled with the new routine. There’s usually a 5-minute quiz at the beginning of class, followed by 15-20 minutes of lecturing/discussion, then 20 minutes of working in groups using an in-class worksheet, and 10 minutes of wrap-up and conclusion. A subset of the students still felt that they would prefer more lecture and less of the in-class worksheets. The most common argument was that they “learned better” through lecture, or at least they felt they did.

Students felt the quizzes were too rushed. I’ve therefore adjusted by giving an additional minute or so (which is 20% more time) and I think this is working well now. They also felt there were too many quizzes. I decided not to reduce the number and explained why having a low-stakes quiz at the beginning of class is actually a powerful learning tool. Not sure whether they bought the argument, but since I have veto power as the instructor I’m keeping things the same. Quizzes count for 10% of the total grade. I plan to give 25-30 quizzes over the semester and I will count the top 20.

The biggest change I made was to scrap the final project and presentation. I felt that this would simply add more stress at the end of the semester. The students had also felt rather stressed with the new format (they had to do more work outside of class then they were accustomed to) in the beginning of the semester, but things have settled down. I had done informal queries to find out how many hours students were spending outside of class and it wasn’t onerous. In fact, it was close to the 10 hours I was expecting per week (class time included), and may have been slightly under. Students aren’t the best at estimating out-of-class time unless they keep a log (which most don’t). Over the years, I have encouraged my first-year advisees to keep a log for a week and see how that changes their behavior.

Without the final project and presentation, I was now able to spread out the material a bit more (with an extra 2.5 weeks). I decided to have in-class exams and final, as opposed to the planned take-home exams. The vast majority of students (except for two) thought this was a great idea. I asked them before making the decision. Another reason why I chose to do this is that I felt the blogs were actually accomplishing some of the things I wanted students to learn as part of the final project. Some students were actually doing research on things that caught their interest. I think this was helped by several high quality blog posts, which slowly resulted in the elevation of quality across the board. Many of the students who were initially skeptical about the utility of the blog posts, found themselves pleasantly surprised that they enjoyed it. A sizable minority (25-33%) however still did not like the blog post requirements and some thought the exercise was rather pointless. I did explain several times why the blog posts would be useful as part of their long-term learning.  Anyway, I’ve decided to keep them but reduced the requirements slightly by allowing students to “miss” two weeks of not posting without penalty.

All in all, I’m happy with the class so far. There are still many areas that could be improved. Although I have managed to reduce my workload, I feel the quality of my worksheets and my facilitating of the in-class discussion has started to suffer in quality compared to earlier in the semester when I was putting in more hours. If only there were more hours in the day, or I didn’t tire out so quickly.

The second midterm exam is coming up next week. Students, on average, did well on the first exam, and now they know what my exams look like, so the next exam should not be as stressful. I moved the final project/paper grades (20%) to the remaining two midterms and the final. Students supported this idea. We’ll see where things stand after I’ve graded the next set of exams.