Bugs 101: Week 3
- Christopher Brown
- Sep 15
- 8 min read
Before we can even get into Week 3, I need to gloat about the Profiles that students submitted, but in order to do that I'll have to treat y'all to some context. I picked up the trick of summative assessment suites while I was teaching 7th grade science back in Colorado. This involves testing student competencies in a variety of ways towards the end of the unit and allows me to re-assess student skills and reinforce unit content at the same time. My go-to trifecta involves a written assignment lovingly termed the 'Essay,' something artsy and creative we're calling the 'Profile' this time around, and a traditional 'Exam' for the purists. Essays let me probe student reasoning and effective use of evidence to support argumentative writing, information literacy, associated citation skills, etc. The Exams are content centered and I see more as a way to pay homage to traditional structures and give students something familiar to cling onto. Lastly, the Profiles are more fun to grade and give creative students an oportunity to show off while incorporating unit content while practicing technological literacy. I wrote a post about assessments eariler this summer if you're feeling in the mood for a pedagogical nerd session.
Back to Week 3. Students were asked to tackle their first Profile coming right off the heels of their first Essay, and were sort of grumbly about grades. The sequence here was intentional, I knew this artsy assessment would win them back and earn them some better grades leading up to Exam week. This is exactly what Maris (my ULA) and I found as we started grading this weekend.
Given only the basic instructions and a series of templates they could use, they created these very colorful, humorous, creative social media profiles for insects they picked and researched. I recognize that asking students to find fun facts is a low bar content wise, but I'm not assessing how much they know about insects, I want to see them flex their creative brain muscles and find interesting ways to display what they've learned while citing their sources correctly.
The graphics, the snarky comments, the colloquial language, all of it made my teacher heart smile and made grading these so much fun! The student that created the youtube video went above and beyond as she was shooting to earn a 4, and created a short video using a filter as her selected insect. Though the tasks are not necessarily difficult, I would argue the effect these products have will be longer lasting compared to those that require more studying and memorization. How could you ever forget "[seeing] the haters in 360°?"
As the future units progress, and the content requirements for these assessments ramps up, the creative restrictions will come down. The hope here is that in the end I can give students a creative prompt and they can choose the best way to display their research while being their funny and creative selves. I can't wait to show off that future student work!
Day 5: Communication & Ethics
Learning Goals & Objectives:
Introduce the modes of communication utilized by insects
Provide an example of each mode, including insect, purpose, and relevant vocabulary
Briefly introduce the concept of nociception and discuss insect pain reception
List the costs and benefits of insect collecting
Prepare students for Exam, reveiwing expectations
Give students time to ask questions and review
This lecture went very quickly, as there were only a couple small points that needed to be hit before the exam so that students had the tools to study adequately. At this point students were pretty familiar with the expectations and had already been working on their study guides for five days. I intentionally left a lot of time, nearly 40 minutes, for students to ask questions and study and came to class prepared to play a Blooket. *Spoiler Alert: We never played the Blooket.*
When given the opportunity to study, nearly everyone left. I still haven't learned my lesson dangling that carrot in front of them, but even those students that really needed the study time didn't stay. Herin lies my next moral dilemma. I don't want to force students with zero interest to sit through a study session that is meant to be fun. But a handful of these kids are blissfully unaware of how underprepared they are for a relatively easy exam. Thankfully, we have until the next exam in four weeks before I need to feel confident with my decision on the subject.
The exit quiz for this class was a google form that collected feedback on the progress of the course thusfar. As this is the final week of Unit 1, I wanted to get a feeling for student perceptions of the course and what support materials they were choosing to engage in.
Course Aspect | Avg. Student Rating |
|---|---|
Lecture | 4.7 |
Assignments | 4.5 |
Pacing | 4.5 |
Activities | 4.3 |
Difficulty | 2.7 |
Based on these perception scores, it seems students feel positively about the lecture design, assignment accessibility (I dedicate this one to Google Docs), general pacing, the quality of 'Brain Break' activities, and I'm not surprised to see a much lower score related to the difficulty of assignments. It will be interesting to check back in and see how these numbers shift throughout the semester.
Behavior | % of Students |
|---|---|
Access Slides via Canva | 64% |
Access Slides via PDF | 48% |
Do not Access Slides | 16% |
Take Notes Digitally | 55% |
Take Notes by Hand | 9% |
Do not Take Notes | 36% |
I was also curious as to how students were accessing the slides and how they were taking notes. I was surprised at the number of students that were both using the Canva slides to follow along in class, and were also downloading the PDFs. It was also scary to find out that a number of students were just raw-dogging the lecture, taking no notes and not looking at the slides. I have a feeling that as the content becomes more difficult we'll see these numbers shift, but there's sort of a sweet nugget in here. These are college students paying for their own education, I just have to provide the supports and materials and for the first time I'm not responsible for holding them accountable for using them.
The exit quiz also allowed students to leave suggestions and comments, which Maris and I reviewed. Mostly students shared how much they liked the class, the slide designs, and general pacing. Aside from one comment pointing out 'tacky' visuals, Maris and I pulled out the suggestions and will incorporate these into the daily strucutres of the next unit.
Day 6: Exam 1
This was the first exam for the course, and my first time proctoring an exam I built in D2L. 'Twas a rocky one:
Everybody came in, we spent a few minutes getting settled and students quized each other as they tend to do in the final minutes before an exam. The heightened energy was sort of surprising and I forgot what it was like to be in the room when the stakes feel higher. Watching these kids nervously quiz eachother and share their little hacks for remembering scientific names and Order specific anatomy was really affirming. Students turned in their Study Guides and we started the exam, and that's when the wheels fell off the bus.
A graphic had deleted itself, students were not getting specific questions to pop up, and the password to unlock the exam was not working for everyone. That being said, on-the-fly fixes and the luxury of a three-projector room got us back up to cruising speed and from there things seemed to continue one pretty well. I was really worried about the difficulty of the questions, as someone that's so deep in the paint when it comes to insect facts it's difficult to sort information between common knowledge, surface level, and challenging.
Many students finished this exam very quickly, a handful took much longer, but no student struggled to finish within the time allotted including those with 150% time accomodations.
Grading went pretty smoothly. It took Maris and I some time to figure out how to best grade from within D2L, and an embedded question that needed to be reported separately posed a slight hiccup. With some .csv dark magic and Maris as my academic weapon, we got grades cranked out very quickly and I was able to post grades within 24 hours of exam completion.
As you can see, the data is pretty... skewed. I suspect the extra credit played a significant role in the shape of this distribution. Extra credit points on this exam were disproportionately high, specifically due to the fact that when extra point opportunities were lost I made it right by offering a workaround, which then opened up extra opportunities for everyone. For the sake of fairness, that's just the way this one worked out. Do I think that 90% of these students realistically should fall into the excelling category, no. But considering that 47 of 48 students turned in study guides, I'm not opposed to letting students walk away feeling good about their first Exam scores. Even if there is a case to be made about "deserving" it.
It's a gen. ed. science course about insects for non-STEM students...
...and the Exams are only worth 15% of the final grade...
...I'll live.
Having put all the scores in, I felt like I was leaving something out. The grading rubric translates exam percentages to a four point grading scale, but this erases a possibility for students to see that they scored above 100%. And so I went searching for an alternative means of recognizing this group of students - which admittedly is 65% of the class.
In the past I've created PDF certificates and sent them to students, which is always a possibility, but I was looking for something that could be more public without requiring printing. I've known about D2L's badges as they are always pointed to as a gamification strategy. I don't think the option to provide badges in and of itself means that you've "gamified" your course, but I like the idea of being able to digitally send students a message celebrating their accomplishment. As I started to dig in to this feature, I found that badges are saved on student D2L profiles, meaning this badge would be visible until the student graduates. As I started creating the badge I also found that I could toggle a feature, clearly intended for legit certificates, that allows students to share their D2L badges on LinkedIn and save them as a certificate with associated skills.
I decided to go with a barbaric theme for this first badge, and had Google's Gemini generate an icon for the badge visual. I also used Gemini to help me craft a themed announcement and description to accompany the "Bug Master" badge.
Forsooth! The legendary Bug Master's Badge is a sign of your exceptional mastery of all things buggy, and stands as a testament to your unyielding intellect. Fear not stinger nor mandible, for Bug Master, you are the apex predator of the six-legged realm.
Students were notified of their awards on Friday afternoon when I finalized the badge, but Maris got the badge honorarily and I went ahead and shared my badge on LinkedIn just to see how it all works. This is something I can easily repeat for the rest of the exams in this class and can be another fun way for me to engage with students and celebrate their insect victories.
Reflecting on this week…
… I think the first unit served it purpose wonderfully. The intent was to give students a low-stakes dry run of the course structure, where they could practice and experience the assessments knowing the grades would be replaced. The rubrics were constantly presented to students and each time their importance was dismissed, probably because the way that professors build and use rubrics. Then, as assessment grades were posted, I was able to reiterate the importance of these grading tools and though I'm sure students are not ready to use them masterfully to complete assignemnts, they've been adequately introduced. This first unit also provided me with some much needed learning experiences, especially related to the LMS. D2L's rubrics are fairly easy to use and allow for detailed feedback to be provided to students, and this was a feature I was not aware of until I started grading. I also overestimated the assessment tools in D2L, assuming they would be more similar to those in Schoology or Google Classroom. I'm learning to work with my systems instead of against them, and I feel like we're really going to hit our stride as we bust into the next unit and start refining all these skills we've started to broach. I can't wait to report back on the first week of Unit 2 where we get to discuss the historical importance of insects and religious symbolism. Stay tuned.
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