Grading (Anxious and Silent) Participation: Assessing Student Attendance and Engagement with Short Papers on a “Question For Consideration"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".