The Choice is Theirs: Students Achieve Positive Outcomes when Offered Flexibility in Course Assessment Options
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research suggests that learning and performance can be promoted when students are given choice over aspects of course design and assessment. This study examined student performance (i.e., grades achieved) as a function of their choice of assessment weighting options and group membership in a senior undergraduate course. A group (N = 109) of upper-year undergraduate students were asked, at the start of term, to select one of nine weighting options for individual and group assessments, and the size of their groups (1 to 5 members). Overall, 85% of students opted for a different assessment weighting option than what the instructor would have provided. Mean grades were significantly greater (~12%) for groups of four and five members compared to those students who conducted the group assessments on their own. In addition, 80% of students demonstrated that they correctly perceived their academic strengths by achieving higher grades on the assessment type to which they allocated the most weight. Allowing students some choice over how assessments are weighted is a relatively simple way of enriching their higher education experience. It is hoped that the positive results of this research will encourage instructors to utilize and implement flexible assessment options in their courses.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".