In one of the classes I TA for (ah, the joys of a "split appointment"), attendance and participation in the recitation (eeew, what an old-fashioned term) sections is worth 10% of the final grade. Quizzes are worth another 40% or so, with papers worth the remainder.
Quizzes aren't announced, but are "more or less" every other week. There's been a pattern apparently of students figuring out that when they've had a quiz in section, they won't have one the following week, so attendance drops like a stone.
My question is, how do you make class discussion valuable? How do you make it something that students "want" to attend? What has to happen there for it to have enough "value" to attend?
My premise is that higher education is different than it used to be. Back in the day, students went to college full time. Other than work-study, they did not work. They went to class (unless exhausted or too hungover) because going to class was their job, regardless of what they thought they might "get out of it" and how it might directly affect their final grade.
Now, it's all different. Students have a lot of demands on their time (perhaps more than can be managed in the time allotted) so they have to prioritize and make decisions: what will happen if I don't go to recitation? I will maybe lose one point out of my 10% participation grade, and I won't sit there for 2 hours listening to my classmates yak about the subject matter.
Hm. In this age of instrumentality, do we HAVE to demonstrate value-added? If so, what IS the value-added of discussion?
Posted by otto0114 at March 4, 2006 11:24 PM