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Students often find biology courses to be very difficult and isolating, particularly if they identify as part of a group that has been historically excluded from STEM. Some of this anxiety and isolation comes from high-stakes exams. We decided to use the collaborative structure of two-stage exams to try to overcome the isolation of assessment. In two-stage exams, students take an individual exam, and then immediately get into groups and take the exam again, discussing the questions and the rationale behind the answers. Their exam scores are a combination of the two attempts. Our move to emergency online learning because of the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to try our two-stage exams online. In this Teaching Tools and Strategies essay, we discuss our process of offering two-stage exams online at two different institutions: a two-year Community College and four-year Research University. We share feedback from the students and discuss our iterative improvements to two-stage exam use.
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Social network development in classrooms
Abstract Group work is often a critical component of how we ask students to interact while learning in active and interactive environments. A common-sense extension of this feature is the inclusion of group assessments. Moreover, one of the key scientific practices is the development of collaborative working relationships. As instructors, we should be cognizant of our classes’ development in the social crucible of our classroom, along with their development of cognitive and/or problem solving skills. We analyze group exam network data from a two-class introductory physics sequence. In each class, on each of four exams, students took an individual version of the exam and then reworked the exam with classmates. Students recorded their collaborators, and these reports are used to build directed networks. We compare global network measures and node centrality distributions between exams in each semester and contrast these trends between semesters. The networks are partitioned using positional analysis, which blocks nodes by similarities in linking behavior, and by edge betweenness community detection, which groups densely connected nodes. By calculating the block structure for each exam and mapping over time, it is possible to see a stabilizing social structure in the two-class sequence. Comparing global and node-level measures suggests that the period from the first to second exam disrupts network structure, even when the blocks are relatively stable.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1712341
- PAR ID:
- 10543535
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Science + Business Media
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Applied Network Science
- Volume:
- 7
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2364-8228
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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