Grading (Anxious and Silent) Participation: Assessing Student Attendance and Engagement with Short Papers on a “Question For Consideration"

The inclusion of attendance and participation in course grade calculations is ubiquitous in postsecondary syllabi, but can penalize the silent or anxious student unfairly.I outline the obstacles posed by social anxiety, then describe an assignment developed with the twin goals of assisting students with obstacles to participating in spoken class discussions, and rewarding methods of participation other than oral interaction.When homework assignments habituating practices of writing well-justified questions regarding well-documented passages in reading assignments are the explicit project of weekly class meetings, participation increases on the part of all students.My focus shifted away from concern that I must get students to talk more, and turned instead to ensuring their marks reflected their learning rather than their speaking.Students' improved engagement as a result of the assignment bears out evidence in the literature for active learning and for alternatives to taking attendance and quantifying participation.Keywords: social anxiety, participation, attendance, grading oral participation How to grade students' participation and count attendance as part of a course grade, if at all 1 , is an enduring challenge for new instructors.As a graduate student, I was disorganized when it came to tracking students' attendance.Moreover, I brought to my assessment woes the particular concern that students with social anxiety and/or selective mutism sometimes cannot talk in class for reasons beyond their control, and occasionally avoid class meetings entirely.2 Yet my first teaching opportunities in graduate school were in leading "discussion sections," the very name of which seemed to reinforce the importance of quantities of talking.More than one confident student seemed to hold the view that if one showed up and talked a great deal, then one deserved a better grade than did the silent classmate in the front row whose heartrate increased and whose throat closed every time they stepped through a classroom door.Initially, then, the assignment I describe in this essay was designed primarily to better

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