Brooke's Despair
This weekend I tooted an initial draft of an epigram describing a phenomenon that I would dub, "Brooke's Despair":
Early in term, feedback is most urgent, yet assessments are (early in term) most time-consuming.
On reflection, I would augment it:
Early in the term, prompt assessments are most urgent, yet most time-consuming, and most in competition with other demands.
Learners have got to get feedback into their hands as soon as possible. All of them need to assess their strategies for tackling the course work. All of them need to see how the assignment rubrics (which they have, right?) function in practice. Some of them are going to need to withdraw at some point, and need to begin to become aware of the fact (it costs more the longer you wait). In my own experience, the course has to be designed with short assignments, early in the term, graded promptly.
But assessments are most time-consuming early in the term. If I have a Teaching Assistant, we are still learning one another's routines; they are still getting to know my rubrics; they are still getting to know how I want to exchange files. Neither of us has gotten to know the learners yet. And the learners themselves are exacerbating the problem through their own problems, forgivable (students entering the course late off of the wait list; problems in student housing; books not attained by the book store) or less so (sloppy interaction with course documents or LMS).
And assessments are in competition with every other start-of-term manner of thing. Every committee has its first meeting coming up. Everything left hanging in the last term demands to be picked up again. Email boxes fill at a soul-crushing rate. The kids are also back in school, so lives at home are in transition ("Hey, Dad, I'm in accelerated math this year! Can you help me?").
Early in the term, prompt assessments are most urgent, yet most time-consuming, and most in competition with other demands.
[Brooke's Despair was written by G. Brooke Lester for Anumma.com and was originally posted on 2012/09/17. Except as noted, it is © 2012 G. Brooke Lester and licensed for re-use only under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.]