Write Your Own Assessment

A math colleague recently shared her endeavor to getting students comfortable writing their own questions (and answers) as part of the learning process. I haven’t personally done much in this area other than my Mock Exam Question assignment in P-Chem; which I’ve been running for a few years with only minor changes. My colleague’s approach is much more extensive and likely to see more gains than my surface-level approach, so I was happy to learn what she was doing. Essentially, she scaffolds the assignments, getting students started on writing a question for a quiz, then a midterm, then a final. She calls this “Write Your Own Assessment” and has been refining it in an introductory-level college algebra course.

 

After the students have taken several short quizzes, the first assignment is “Write Your Own Quiz”. The guidelines students are given have been exemplified by previous weekly quizzes that they’ve taken. One question can be easy to answer, but a second one must be of at least moderate difficulty. Students must also include a detailed answer key to their submission. She then “grades” their efforts by providing feedback on the quality of their submission.

 

A month later, the next assignment is Write Your Own Midterm, and provide an answer key. There are similar guidelines to the Write Your Own Quiz assignment in terms of what is expected. And towards the end of the semester there is Write Your Own Final. Students are allowed to include similar, but not identical, previous questions they’ve written for the Quiz or Midterm assignments. In addition, the students also write a paper reflecting on what they have learned through the process of writing their own assignments. I mulled a similar reverse final because of the pandemic but ultimately did not follow through. I certainly had not put in the scaffolding for it.

 

My approach falls far short of this. I do tell the students how to go about writing a Mock Exam Question based on the Problem Set questions they’ve seen in P-Chem. They each have to submit at least one question, and they work in groups of four with the stipulation that the range of questions submitted covers some breadth. (They can’t all write a question on the same topic.) I did not provide any feedback on their submissions nor did I ask for a detailed answer key. I did tell them that they should know the answers to their questions, and I expected that after taking the exam they would have a sense of whether their question was well-posed. Honestly, I was lazy and didn’t want to do a bunch more grading beyond looking to see that students followed the parameters. I provided a small incentive of unspecified extra credit for particularly good submissions (as subjectively judged by me for relevance and creativity).

 

I gave full credit (1% of the overall course grade) for each assignment. There were three – and each of them was due the day of the midterm (thus students who did the assignments would get 3%). A small number of students simply don’t do them (or forget) but the majority do so. Typically, one or two students get the extra credit for one of the assignments per semester. Overall, this is a very low stakes assignment that I hoped helped them as they were studying for the midterms.

 

Listening to my colleague’s approach and seeing her assignment instructions reminded me how poor my version was compared to hers. I haven’t sufficiently leveraged the power of Write Your Own Assessment assignments and I could do better in this area. In her instructions, she also tells the students that they will find the assignment difficult at first and resort to using a known problem and just changing the numbers or making a minor modification. She exhorts this initial approach as “a great way to start”, but expects that as they approach the final assignment, they will start to write more creative and interesting problems. My students mostly stay at the initial approach because I haven’t provided guidelines or feedback to push the more creative aspects of writing good problems. This is something for me to think about and ponder now that the semester is ending, as I start to think about next semester’s classes!