Wiki Essay: Week 3, Assessment in E-Learning

My AP European History students worked on their collaborative essays on the course wiki this week.  Essays were due on Friday. I have been pleased with the process thus far, but do have some things to iron out.

Positives:

I offered students feedback on Thursday night in the comment box.  Most groups had some significant work done by then, and I later read students about incorporating the feedback into the final product.  My suggestions were one sentence long.  I think this made the essays truly formative assessments, because participating students were able to act on my assessment.  I do this with in-class essays, too, by reading student work at their request during essay tests, but this allowed me to see everyone's work.

I also liked that the students were able to see how other students pre-wrote.  In most groups one or more students did some pre-writing by organizing details or analysis into labeled lists before actual writing began.  In the other groups one student put out a thesis first and then essay emerged from that.  Slowing down the essay writing process allowed students to see or practice a pre-writing technique.

Issues:

Several students either did not participate in the essay construction or only participated once.  This issue would probably be greater outside of the AP pool of students.  Other participating students did see the essay as an assignment more than a process and left work late to complete, minimizing the amount of time for feedback.

The other issue was student over use of outside resources.  The essays prompts require analysis supported by specific historical examples.  All prompts were taken from previous AP tests. Here is a sample topic, the choice of one student group:  European women’s lives changed in the course of the nineteenth century politically, economically, and socially.  Identify and explain the reasons for these changes.  The analytic task is for students to identify the overall factors that were promoting changes in women's lives, for example industrialization and the growth of the middle-class.  Outside sources should allow students to then provide more specific examples as evidence.  In practice many student groups loaded up on examples, often to the detriment of analytic categories, while others actually lacked examples, in part because they were replicated analysis from the book.

Adjustment for next time:
 
I think that one adjustment will address several of the issues: breaking the assignment into chunks.  If I were to award class points for participating in the pre-writing this would deepen this benefit, allow me to offer in-course corrections twice, and help me to identify and pressure students who are not participating.  I will definitely do this again with this modification.