Collaborative/Cooperative Learning - A Novel Approach to Testing
(These items are from a listserv about teaching.)
Students take a SHORT quiz as individuals. That is collected. Then - they are given the IDENTICAL quiz to be worked in collaborative groups. One grade is awarded for the individual and another for the group work. I have seen it used where the individual part of the quiz was worth 60% and the group part 40% and various other creative distributions of points. That is a teacher decision. The interesting effect comes when listening to the group conversations. You will hear great amounts of learning occurring as students compare the answers they originally entered - respond to that wonderful question "how did you do #n?" and in general behave in ways we encourage for group work. Another interesting side effect to this technique is that individual papers can be graded while students are working on their group paper. I generally have the groups exchange and grade each others papers immediately. That way ALL grading is done before the students leave the room, students know immediately what the correct solutions looked like and even know their group grade. With a handy laptop they can even have their individual papers back on the spot.
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Last Modified:
05/22/08
