Throughout my years in higher education, I have had conversations with many faculty who are anxious when it comes to the student rating process. Many have said that they fear giving a student the grade they earned for fear that the student will rate the instructor badly in retaliation. I usually point out that the grade is posted after the student rating period is closed yet some have said that they think the student has a feeling about receiving a bad grade and so they give the faculty a lower rating. This sounded irrational to me although I am not disregarding anyone's feelings. There is a lot of stress that comes with teaching and students typically talk about the "grade you are giving me" rather than the grade they earned. So I was happy to discover a new study that brings some research to the topic. Tripp, Jiang, Olson, and Graso found that a student's perception that fairness is being used in the course reduces the chance of "evaluation retaliation." “We’ve long known there’s an association between expected students’ course grades and how they evaluate teachers,” lead author Thomas Tripp, associate dean of business at Washington State University at Vancouver, said in a statement. “Faculty may not feel a need to award artificially high grades, if they knew how students’ perceptions of justice might influence this relationship.”Read more here.

As elearning program (online, distance education, hyflex, etc.) enrollments continue to increase around the world and locally (BRCC's enrollment doubled from summer 2017 to summer 2018), certain issues continue to impede student success. We know that student engagement is very important to motivation but how can we promote interactions between and among students and the instructor? In addition, students using the eLearning delivery mode need to have good time management skills in order to stay focused and meet deadlines. Dr. Danielle Geary suggests that it all begins with our syllabus. "Structure and communication. That’s what I’ve found to be the keys to an effective online course syllabus. Well, that, and something I call a chapter checklist, to go along with the syllabus. I’ve discovered both to be essential to my asynchronous online foreign language course," she writes. She goes on to describe how taking the time to explain the effort needed to succeed in an elearning course (i.e. tips for studying) can be very beneficial to students as they enter the semester. You can read her entire article here.

We all know Dr. Benjamin Bloom for his taxonomy but did you know that he also wrote about how learning occurs under different methods of instruction? Using research conducted by two of his doctoral students (which he guided), the 2 Sigma Problem emerged. The instructional methods were identified as conventional, mastery and tutoring. Although written in 1984, I am struck by the lack of movement from the conventional teaching method although active teaching leading to active learning has made an impact and continues to grow as practitioners discover news ways to ignite student performance. Of course we are left wondering which mode worked the best? Bloom, Anania, and Burke found that using the conventional mode of instruction as a baseline, students under mastery learning saw a one-sigma (standard deviation) improvement in performance. Students who received one-on-one tutoring saw a two-sigma improvement. As Alfred Essa, Vice President of R&D and Analytics at McGraw-Hill Education, explains "A one sigma is roughly a one-letter grade in improvement. It can be the difference between a student failing a course and passing a course—and most educational interventions don’t come close. If one sigma of improvement is huge, two is monumental." You can read Bloom's article here.