So it’s Friday afternoon and I, like half the people at university today, are more focused on tonight’s opening game than they are on work. So, I’m not feeling too inspired to put in a long blog entry today.
But I will mention that yesterday I tried a ‘delayed mark’ approach when I returned a piece of work to students. (It was a formal write-up of one of their lab experiments). That’s one of the teaching strategies suggested by Phil Race. The point is that if you give students written feedback on their work AND a mark at the same time, the mark negates all the feedback and you might as well not have bothered. It’s better to give them the feedback, then, later, give them the mark, when they’ve had time to read the feedback.
There were a few squeaks (rather than howls) of protest, but I think it was mostly because my poor students had never come across this approach before.
The question, though, as always, is "will it mean they do better in their next piece of work?". They start on another similar piece of work next week, so I’ll get to find out. I guess if there’s one thing that doing a Postgraduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching has inspired me to do, it’s to try things out.