Jodi,
Congratulations on making the transition to TBL! At Regis University School of Pharmacy (a new pharmacy school), we have completed our first year of a TBL-based curriculum with high integration of biomedical, pharmaceutical and clinical sciences. I'd be happy to provide insight on our first year's experience for you if that would be helpful sometime.
We count application exercises as part of the overall course grade. For most TBL courses, the overall breakdown is 60% individual (iRAT, exams, peer eval) and 40% team (tRAT and application exercise). During the grade-weight setting exercise near the beginning of each course, students may stipulate 20-30% of course grade to applications and 10-20% to tRAT; so far, they are selected 20% application and 20% tRAT in most courses. It would certainly be wonderful reach a point in the curriculum where it is clear that our students will work on applications just as hard if we didn't grade them, but for now they are graded.
Given our highly integrated curriculum model, we have many different faculty delivering applications in a given course. To help with consistency, we set a rough guideline for point allocation to applications as follows: 10 points for about 30 minutes of work/discussion; 20 points for about 60 minutes, and 40 points for about 120 minutes (for the 2-hour TBL courses). Again, just a rough guideline to help with consistency. The points are converted to a percent score for applications (and for the other categories, like tRATs), so 40 application points are not equivalent to 40 tRAT points for example.
Again, please feel free to contact me if I can be of assistance.
Michael Nelson, PhD, RPh
Rueckert-Hartman College for Health Professions School of Pharmacy
Regis University, Denver, Colorado
303.625.1265 (phone) 303.625.1305 (fax) [log in to unmask]
-----Original Message-----
From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of TEAMLEARNING-L automatic digest system
Sent: Friday, June 18, 2010 1:00 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: TEAMLEARNING-L Digest - 16 Jun 2010 to 17 Jun 2010 (#2010-82)
There are 2 messages totalling 104 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. Grading Application Exercises (2)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:27:52 -0700
From: Jodi Delfosse <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Grading Application Exercises
At the Medical College of Wisconsin, we are transitioning to TBL as the primary
method of student engagement as we are at the same time integrating our
basic and clinical sciences in the first two years. We've read what we can
from a variety of sources, including searching this listserve, but are still not
clear on whether institutions actually grade (or assign points) the application
exercises.
In most of the discussions around Setting Grade Weights, IRATs and TRATS
have individual line items, but the application exercises usually do not. Is this
because you do not provide grades based on the quality of the choice made
and/or the reasoining given by the team? The concern that has been
expressed is that if students know they are not "graded" on the application
exercise, they will skip that portion of the classtime. Is the Peer Evaluation
process really enough to ensure that students do not "skip out" on this highly
valuable activity?
Any suggestions/guidance will be greatly appreciated!
Jodi Delfosse
Education Innovation Office
Medical College of WI
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:37:08 +0800
From: Sandy Cook <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Grading Application Exercises
Dear Jodi and all,
I think that most people DO give points and count the applications, for exactly the reason you expressed - if graded will they actually work hard for the answers. I would urge you to include them in the scoring mechanism in some fashion.
To be even more heretical and show how much we value the team portion of the learning - we stipulate that for all the 1st year basic science courses approximately 50% of the grade comes from individual work and approximately 50% comes from teamwork. Individual work scores come from the IRATs and any midterm/finals/projects that a course might have. There is some variation by course as to the individual components - ie. Some only use TBL - thus IRATs become the sole individual score. Some include other assessment - which will then impact the weight of the IRATS. If 50% of the grade comes from IRATS alone - they have a much higher weightage - and clearly paid attention by the students. The counter argument is that they still learn so much from the TRAT and application - that it is good to let them have another assessment to show their increase. Both are effective.
The team scores are made up of the TRAT, Application, and Peer. In fact, we insist that the peer have no less than 10% of the grade - so it is a significant component.
With the 50/50 distribution, obviously there has to be some parameters as to how much each component can be - thus there is a limit as to how much the students can adjust things.
As an example - if a course has only TBL - and if approximately 50% of grade comes from IRAT - then obviously each IRAT has to be no less than 50%/#IRATS.
Then, if 50% comes from teamwork and 10% is already assigned to peer - there is only 40% to allocate to TRAT and Application. We give the students some say in that distribution - 20/20, 30/10 - but again, with some limits - that say it cannot be less than x%. By the end of the year, the points don't mean as much to the students and the faculty have actually assigned the distributions - usually something like 50% IRAT, 20% TRAT, 20% Application, 10% peer.
If there is an exam that is 20% - then the IRATs can only be 30%/#IRATs - etc.
I hope that helps a bit.
Sandy
********************************************************
Sandy COOK, PhD | Senior Associate Dean, Curriculum Development |
Medical Education, Research, and Evaluation (MERE) |
Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School Singapore | Khoo Teck Puat Building | 8 College Road Singapore |169857 |
W: (65) 6516 8722| F: (65) 6227 2698 |
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-----Original Message-----
From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jodi Delfosse
Sent: Friday, June 18, 2010 3:28 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Grading Application Exercises
At the Medical College of Wisconsin, we are transitioning to TBL as the primary
method of student engagement as we are at the same time integrating our
basic and clinical sciences in the first two years. We've read what we can
from a variety of sources, including searching this listserve, but are still not
clear on whether institutions actually grade (or assign points) the application
exercises.
In most of the discussions around Setting Grade Weights, IRATs and TRATS
have individual line items, but the application exercises usually do not. Is this
because you do not provide grades based on the quality of the choice made
and/or the reasoining given by the team? The concern that has been
expressed is that if students know they are not "graded" on the application
exercise, they will skip that portion of the classtime. Is the Peer Evaluation
process really enough to ensure that students do not "skip out" on this highly
valuable activity?
Any suggestions/guidance will be greatly appreciated!
Jodi Delfosse
Education Innovation Office
Medical College of WI
------------------------------
End of TEAMLEARNING-L Digest - 16 Jun 2010 to 17 Jun 2010 (#2010-82)
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