Tokens For Assignment Resubmission

In this chapter:

Intent
Problem
Solution
Applicability
How to Implement
See Also
Source
References
Community Discussion

Intent

A system that supports resubmissions from students with limited attempts (using tokens) can help facilitate student learning.

Problem

In traditional grading systems that use partial credit, students can sometimes be disincentivized in processing or reviewing instructor feedback because there is no direct grade-related benefit for doing so. This problem can compound in courses where the future assignments build upon skills and competencies from past work as students may continue to demonstrate the same deficiencies as shown previously. Allowing re-submissions can lead to over-work on the part of instructors, or procrastination on the part of the students if they feel they can always re-submit indefinitely.

Solution

One strategy for getting students to take feedback more seriously is to replace partial credit with a system that uses a pass/fail structure for assignments and couple this with the ability for the students to resubmit their work for regrading. This helps to ensure unacceptable work is not given partial credit and also helps to get students to review instructor feedback so they can fix issues with the assignment and resubmit it to achieve credit on their work. A token system can be used to give students a limited number of resubmissions. The number of resubmissions and types of assignments on which resubmissions may be made can vary from course to course.

Applicability

Resubmission can be used with any assignment where there is value to the process of correcting their mistakes. Resubmission and feedback can be configured in some cases to be handled automatically using some sort of autograding tool.

How to Implement

To develop a plan for implementation, first the instructor must decide which assignments are eligible for revision and resubmission. Not all assignments need to be included, and in many cases only a subset of assignments that best lend themselves to resubmission are selected. When allowing resubmissions, it is generally good practice to provide detailed feedback to the students so that they know where they need to focus their efforts to address deficiencies in their work.

To limit the required instructor grading time and potential abuse by students frequently resubmitting minor changes, a token system can be implemented to cap the number of resubmissions. This can be time-based (one expirable token per week) or quantity-based (four tokens for the semester). In some cases students can earn tokens by completing tasks or receive additional tokens as bonuses based on pre-set criteria. Student tokens can be tracked in the course LMS, or via some other accounting mechanism that works for the course.

Source

Source: Anderson Trimm. 2023. “Mastery Grading in Secondary Mathematics.” Presentation at the Institute Day. https://digitalcommons.imsa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1477&context=proflearningday

Source: Scott Spurlock. 2023. Improving Student Motivation by Ungrading. In Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1 (SIGCSE 2023). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 631–637. https://doi.org/10.1145/3545945.3569747

Described by: Christian Roberson, croberson@flsouthern.edu

References

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Community Discussion

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