A Formula for Motivating Online Discussion

I chose the article, “Designing Grading Policy to Motivate Student Participation in Online

Discussion Forum,” for my last editorial entry because as a Graduate Teaching Assistant I spend many hours each week grading online discussion posts, and lack of student participation is a problem that I have noticed.  In this journal article, Zuopeng Zhang investigates how teachers should design grading policies for online forums to guarantee maximum student effort.  Zhang analyzes research based on scientific studies of student participation in online discussion forums to provide mathematical formulas, which predict the student behavior for different grading policies.    

The data uncovered that students will respond to online discussion prompts that require the least amount of time to satisfactorily answer the question and receive the most points possible.  Basically, if there are too many posts required in a given semester, the quality of students; post decline. Therefore, if a teacher wants to encourage quality student work they should design a grading system that awards more point to students who chose to answer prompts that take more time to answer and involve higher-level thinking.  However, the study also reveals that because not all students have a maximum amount of time to answer the prompts that require the highest-level of thinking, some students will instead answer many low-level thinking questions to accumulate the same amount of points as answering one more difficult prompt.  Ultimately, Zhang suggests that teachers should establish a minimum amount of posts required that takes into account that some students will have less time to participate; teachers should give more points to posts that require higher-level thinking if they expect fewer, but quality posts; if a teacher wants to encourage quantity instead of quality, they should award more points to students who answer the lower-level thinking prompts.

The findings were fascinating; I encourage anyone with a math background to explore the complicated formulas. I will attach the article to this post.  What I like the best about this article is that it discusses a model for discussion post grading that I have not been exposed to in my short career as a Teaching Assistant.  In the blended grading model designed to encourage quality and quantity of posts, students are given many prompts to answer, with the harder prompts worth a maximum of fifteen points, medium-level prompts worth no more than ten points, and easiest prompts worth at most five points.  The posts are then graded on this scale and points are accumulated during the semester to reach an established number for corresponding letter grades.

With this grading system, working students who do not have extended blocks of time to devote to online posting can still earn good grades by answering many easier prompts during the week.  I also liked that the points assigned to the prompts were not guaranteed, which encourages quality.  If a student answers a harder question, they need to do a good job to earn all of the points. 

Unfortunately, this article offered no research on encouraging responses to other students’ posts to encourage a conversation.  Because most of the online discussion boards that I have graded feature a theoretical discussion between students as the main object of the exercise, this article does not give me tips for motivating this behavior.  However, I could still apply these findings to my grading scales for initial posts, and develop a different system for calculating points for replies to these posts.          

Zhang, Zuopeng. “Designing Grading Policy to Motivate Student Participation in Online

Discussion Forum.” International Journal of Innovation and Learning 9.1 (2010): 1-20. Print.

A Terrible Grading Policy

            In these editorials, I try to look at both side of the issue, but when I read Paula Wasley’s article “A New Way to Grade: Students Grade Students” in The Chronicle of Higher, I have to admit that I did not see any positive aspects to the grading system described.  In the controversial Texas Tech freshman composition grading system, students’ writing is not graded by their classroom instructor but by a “document instructor,” who never meets the students.  The document instructor, actually a graduate-assistant will grade the paper sent to them by e-mail using a software program that finds errors.  Once graded by one instructor, the paper will be sent through the grading program to another graduate student document instructor to be graded again.  If the grades are more than eight points apart, the paper will be graded by a third grader. Also in this system, freshmen composition students spend less time in the classroom and more time writing. 

Proponents for the computerized system say that it is good because it establishes set standards for “good” writing, makes grading impartial, and saves the university money while compiling invaluable statistical data about how freshmen composition students are progressing.   Opponents of the grading system argue that teachers lose all of their power and influence over the class by not grading their papers and are upset that grades, even an 89.99 percent, cannot be rounded up to the next letter grade.      

My first objection with this program is that because classroom instructors do not grade their students’ papers they lose a valuable medium to communicate with students.  I understand a grade as a way for the instructor to communicate to the students whether or not they are meeting the course goals and if they understand the course material.  If a teacher is not allowed to assess their own students’ papers, then how can they determine if the students are learning what they are teaching? The students should be upset that they are denied valuable instructor feedback. The document instructor does not know what the classroom instructor has told the students; therefore, their generalized comments left on the digital papers will be completely out of context in relation to the classroom instruction. 

The next flaw that I see with this program is that it relies heavily on a computer system to assess “standardized” good writing.  Texas Tech complained that there were many definitions of good writing in their composition program before using the computerized document instructor method; however, the logic that there is one single form of good writing is flawed because what counts as good writing depends completely on the context of the discourse community and the subject that the writer is discussion.  Because the computer program only counts punctuation and form, it completely leaves out the content of the essays.  It seems that the administration thinks the overworked graders will factor “content” into their assessment, but how can they if they do not know the context of the assignment that the teacher gave them.  Even with a standard set of assignments, each teacher will deliver his or her expectations differently.  In this system, writing is viewed like a math problem with an absolute right answer. 

My final objection to this grading system is that it takes the power away from the classroom instructor, and students away from the classroom-with a reduced face-to-face time.  For example, one composition classroom instructor, Lindsay Hutton said, “People think you're just there as this kind of middleman, which you are. Once I started to feel that way, it became difficult for me to really put much into it" (Wasley,  n.p.).

How can a graduate-student grading hundreds of papers a week with a computer program really take the time to account for craft or style?  I do not think they can. I see how this system saves Texas Tech money, but I believe that the students miss out on quality first year composition instruction.    

Wasley, Paula.  “A New Way to Grade: Students Grade Students.” The Chronicle of Higher

            Education 52.27 (2006): n.p. Gale. Web. 4 March 2011.