Using Small Stakes Assignments to Reduce Student Stress
By Jessica Parr, Associate Professor (Teaching) of Chemistry – October 7, 2020
Even in a normal situation the word exam starts to bring up the blood-pressure of some students. They see scheduled exams on the syllabus and anticipate sink or swim situations where they are destined to fail. Just the thought of an exam sends some students into a spiral.
I was not one of these students when I was in undergrad, or even in graduate school. I entered an exam knowing I was confident in most things and not in some, but I would do my best and that was all that I could do. This doesn’t mean that I did not study, but I did not have the level of anxiety that I see in some of my current students. I understood the stakes of the exam, but there were always other opportunities to show what I had learned.
Some students enter our classrooms with the idea, that they have learned from movies, or been told by older sibling, that one exam can ruin their entire academic career. No matter what they are told in office hours, or over email they still think that doing poorly on one exam will keep them from pursuing their careers. This is particularly exaggerated in some of the first-year population. Students who have earned GPAs greater than 4.0 in high school come in thinking they are going to repeat that, and are disappointed to learn that in college the GPA tops out at 4.0. The constant yearning for higher and higher scores, or extra credit becomes a distraction for them from concentrating on what is important, actually learning.
In the past few semesters as I reflect on best practices in instruction and revising my own instructional methods I have started to make high point valued exams account for a smaller percentage of the course total. Using Blackboard, I am able to assign a larger number of homework assignments which are graded automatically, if numerical answers, or can be graded more swiftly for short answer/essay questions with the help of teaching assistants. These homework assignments also mean that students are receiving feedback more frequently. Students are being forced to stay on top of the material, breaking the bad habit of saving it to study just before an exam.
Homework and writing assignments cannot completely replace the type of assessment that can be teased out from an exam, but students are still stressed out by that actual word. Over the summer, I renamed my exams. I started calling them Data Analysis Assignments. Some of the questions were exactly the same as what they would have seen on a traditional exam, but changing the name of the assessment flattened this perceived barrier and students found the environment to be more welcoming. The more comfortable the environment, the better students will be able to learn.
This semester, I am continuing to have Data Analysis Assignments, but have also introduced short quizzes which happen frequently. The quizzes provide feedback to students on their ability to apply algorithms and the conceptual material that we have been talking about in class. The quizzes are timed, but open book. Students still need to be very familiar with the material, but having quizzes relieves the burden from what students expect an exam to be. A lot of Chemistry students hear exam and think that the questions will be written in a tricky way to trip them up. They psych themselves out and often make the question more complicated than it actually is. When you give them a quiz, they expect the questions to be more straightforward and they approach it with a more positive attitude.
At the end of the day as instructors we need to think carefully about the purpose of the assignments and assessments. Are we simply having students complete them because that is how it has always been done? Is this the only way to assess what students have learned and if they are prepared to move on to future classes? I am constantly reflecting on these questions. Sometimes I find the way that it has been traditionally been done is a good strategy, other times I try something new. Will I ever find the best way? Maybe not, but my goal is always to help each and everyone of my students learn and hopefully have some fun.