Improving Student Work with Multimedia and Rubrics
Monday, December 19th, 2011
Prof. Nancy Ritchie
Prof. Nancy Ritchie wanted to improve student projects created for her “Baseball Through the Years” quantitative literacy class. In the class, students adopt a baseball team and work with the team’s statistics. They create a Google site to display their research and the PowerPoint they create for their final presentation.
But Nancy was not happy. The students seemed to be just going through the motions, cutting and pasting the minimal information into their sites”. She wanted them to be able to marshal statistics to prove an argument. She had heard about a colleague’s assignment to pick the “best player” in baseball and defend their choice in a paper. She decided to use the outline of that assignment and change it in significant ways.
“I modified that assignment and asked students to choose a person on their team and prove that he was the “Best Batter for the Bucks.” Students then created a video narrative explaining their statistics using Screencast-o-matic, a free online screen-casting tool.
Student Impact
“What I’ve found so far in working with my students, is that when they are asked to do something online, they excel (for the most part). AND they remember what they’ve done and why. I had hoped that if they had to defend what they were selecting, they would work hard to come up with the proof.
“I know for a fact that by encouraging the students to research online data, they are much more engaged in their own learning (often unintentionally!). The participation rate significantly improved! In comparing the “enhanced” class to my other class, I found that students seemed to be more proactive in looking at what their team (and specifically the player they selected) was doing over the course of the summer. I also found that we moved through material much more quickly in the classroom, so we actually completed the material sooner than expected – even with the additional assignments.“
In a comparison of the improvement over the pre-test results, the post test for the class that was not enhanced was less than 10%. The class that was enhanced improved by 17.8% between the pre-test and post-test.
Things I would change
“I still need to work on rubrics. IQL gives us the one for the final project. But if in the future I want to provide a rubric for each assignment. I think that would be helpful to the students, and to me for measurement. The students were given a rubric for the Screencast-o-matic assignment, and that will need some additional tweaking. Some of the categories need to be removed or modified. For example, since we did the SOM’s against pages of a web site, some of the font sizes were out of our control. While I insist on students using works cited info on their final project, I didn’t emphasize it for this project, and I should have. As far as sound, we learned that YouTube videos were difficult to record and get the sound. Some of the images needed to be larger. We had done the web sites first, and the images enlarged on the overhead, but didn’t for the SOM. We also had more noise since most of the recordings were done in the classroom. While the rubric WAS handed out in class, many of the students seem to be confused about what was expected. I was disappointed in all but one of the SOM’s, but I still felt that the steps they went through to collect the data and prepare for the SOM helped enhance the learning of the students.”
For Professor Ritchie’s complete report, click here.
To view the rubric she used click here.
