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.
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