First Day of Online Teaching: Part 2
Author: Arlene Vinion Dubiel
Syllabus and Pre-assessment
This is the second in a series of three blogs designed to help you prepare for the first day of an online class.
In last week’s blog, I recommended building relationships with students by responding to each student’s introduction. This is going to take some time and you don’t want your students to sit idle during the first days of an online class. So, what can you have your students do while you are writing? In this blog, I’ll share my recommendations for orienting students to the class through a syllabus quiz and assessing students’ prior and required knowledge through a pre-assessment.
It’s in the syllabus
We all know that the syllabus is the most important document for any class. It dictates the class policies for attendance, grading, and behaviors. It usually contains the schedule for the class and some institution-required pieces of information like where to go for technical support. It is often several pages of dense text that we want our students to be familiar with. However, most students do not take the time to read or absorb the information in it. Check out PHD comics “It’s in the Syllabus” for something we can all relate to!
When I first started teaching, I followed the lead of my instructors by using the first day of an in-person class to go over the syllabus. This would take a significant amount of time with the result of little to no content covered on that day. Even when I converted to using a learning management system (LMS) and blended instruction, I would still take time to go over the syllabus. Then, a couple years ago, I was out of town for the first day of class, so I restructured the first day to be fully remote with the result that I will no longer go over the syllabus in class.
Our students are perfectly capable of reading a syllabus despite its length and density of information. Like any text, some parts of our syllabus are more important than others. So, I now routinely use a 5-10 question, mostly multiple choice syllabus quiz. The quiz includes practical questions that I want my students to know. Some questions I’ve included are: “What is my name?” “What is included in participation points (check all that apply).” “When is (assignment) due?” “What do you do if you cannot come to a class meeting?” and “How do you name your assignments when you submit them?”
The purpose of this syllabus quiz is to ensure that students know the class policies or at least know where to find information. Being online, the quiz is open book and there is unlimited time and unlimited attempts. The quiz is structured so students can see which questions they missed, but the correct answer is not provided. I expect students to receive a perfect score on the syllabus quiz and encourage them to retake it until a perfect score is achieved. Since I have instituted this syllabus quiz, I have had very few questions from students where I have to respond “It’s in the syllabus.” Try it and see if it works for you too.
Pre-assessment
In a previous blog post, I talked about using pre-assessments to identify your students’ achievement gaps. That post encouraged you to consider the essential understandings your students need to have to engage in the content. Then write a few questions that can address those understandings. Let’s use that information to create and administer a pre-assessment.
Administering a pre-assessment to my students has saved me time and effort by allowing me to focus my instruction on what students need rather than on what I think they need. When I taught freshman biology courses, I pre-assessed on several topics including the metric system and Punnett Squares. The majority of my students were comfortable with both of these topics so I chose not to use class time to cover them. Instead I held an office session on the metric system and put together a study sheet for Punnett squares. The pre-assessment and support for students who needed it allowed us to spend class time on more challenging topics.
“Making your students complete a syllabus quiz and pre-assessment will save you time in class. It also puts responsibility for learning onto your students.”
It is not necessary to create one large pre-assessment covering all topics for a class, rather you can write several smaller pre-assessments that address a particular topic. In addition to determining whether students already possess the knowledge you will be teaching, you will want to determine readiness for instruction. For example, I asked my chemistry students to do some algebra problems to ensure that they had these necessary math skills to work the chemistry equations.
When administering your pre-assessment, there are three basic rules that need to be followed.
1. Pre-assessments are NOT GRADED. Emphasize this point with your students. Start by communicating the purpose for the pre-assessment – to see what your students know and don’t know right now. They need to take it seriously, but there is no pressure of getting ‘correct’ answers. For multiple choice problems, include “I don’t know” as an option. You may consider making the pre-assessment timed to ensure that students cannot look up unknown information. Having a final question asking students to gauge their confidence level for their responses is a good way of seeing how they feel.
2. Structure the pre-assessment so it starts with easier questions and then harder ones. Being able to answer some questions from the start will help to build students’ confidence. If you start off with difficult questions, they may give up early and you will not have an accurate measure of what your students know.
3. Use the results of each pre-assessment to make decisions about your instruction. Seeing that most of my students could Punnett Squares made me decide to create the Punnett Squares study sheet and then start with more complicated genetics problems in class. I’ve also used pre-assessment results to differentiate classes for some topics and activities, purposely grouping students to meet common needs.
The pre-assessment is probably the most useful and under-used tool in teaching.Try it and see how it works for you.
Making your students complete a syllabus quiz and pre-assessment will save you time in class. It also puts responsibility for learning onto your students by requiring them to read the syllabus and know what deficits they may have in their learning. As Confucious is reported to have said: “To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge,” and knowledge is the purpose of education.
To save yourself time, create a syllabus quiz rather than going over the syllabus in class. Also create and administer pre-assessments for the class or for particular topics in order to meet students’ individual needs.
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