The learning curve

Whenever students ask me if I “curve” my course, my standard answer is “no, because I don’t believe in basing your grade on someone else’s performance.” But, that’s not the kind of curve I’m talking about today.

How many of you have lab reports or other written reports as part of your course? Most, if not all, I suspect. Communicate coherently about a subject is a way to demonstrate multi-dimensional understanding about it, since the student often must synthesize ideas to explain their subject fully. One important aspect of writing a report or a paper is understanding what the instructor wants in the way of format, content, etc. Although we clearly state our requirements in our respective syllabi, the students often don’t grasp our intent (assuming they read it in the first place) and the first (or first few) reports are usually pretty traumatic for both of us. This was my experience for several semesters until I decided to do something different and it has made a huge difference. In the chemistry course I teach, the students write reports on 9 labs through the course of the semester. During the first unit of the course, two reports are due. In the past, these first reports were usually terrible; indicating that many students had either not read or had willfully ignored my requirements. On average, it wasn’t until the 4^th report that most students had gotten the message and had read and attempted to conform to the requirements. As you can imagine, this was a source of frustration for me – why weren’t they just doing what I asked?

The solution I came up with was two-fold. First, knowing that students often had trouble getting textbooks and lab kits until several days into the course, I relaxed the Unit 1 deadlines so that they could turn in both reports (and all three chapter tests) at the very end of the Unit. Secondly, I encouraged them to turn in the first lab report as soon as they could, promising that I would return it with feedback, but would not grade it until after they resubmitted. This made all the difference. I still get similar numbers of terrible first reports, but for some reason they respond better to the non-graded feedback and fix the systemic issues very rapidly. On average, they are now hitting the target by the 2^nd report instead of the 4^th, which allows me to focus more energy on their understanding of the lab itself, rather than on formatting issues.