Yoda’s Secret To Success in K¹² High School Programs
I have never worked in a brick-and-mortar school setting where the staff had as many students succeeding academically as we would have liked. This is usually not due to a lack of staff effort or sound instructional practices. Most often there were outside influences that presented barriers to student success that schools just are not set up to address. The same holds true in our K¹² schools. There is a contingency of students who – no matter the efforts of school staff – fail to succeed academically.
The difference between there (brick and mortar) and here (online) is that here I have activity and grade data that I can use to study the problem. One thing that has become abundantly clear is the connection between effort and passing rates. Students who submit teacher-scored assessments tend to pass courses more often than students who do not – even when the quality of work on those assessments is poor. Unfortunately, students often stick to completing only the computer-scored activities which – in and of themselves – do not comprise enough points overall to lead to a passing grade in the course. They “try” but they never fully “do” the whole course. They would do well to follow Yoda’s sage advice: “Do or do not…there is no try.”
Teacher-scored assignments are important. They often assess understanding at higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. In addition, they add a level of academic integrity to the course as open-ended assignments and questions are more difficult to cheat on than closed-ended items.
Why do students often fail to complete the teacher-scored items in a course? That’s somewhere I am trying to gain more insight. Lots of theories – anxiety about their abilities, technical issues that we never hear about, they are more difficult and the student doesn’t want to exert the effort…maybe all of these, I’m not sure. But I know that every day we learn more and more about student behavior in our courses and we continue to strive to ensure academic success for every student.
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