Dear Christine,

I am using TBL in the 1st year of a brand new medical school program here in Singapore.  We have just begun our first year, so we have much to learn, but have also experienced much.  Our curriculum is broken into several integrated content blocks (Molecules & Cells, Normal Body, Brain & Behavior, Body and Disease) and two content themes that go across the entire year (Clinical Skills and Investigative tools and methods).  All the students take the same blocks.  We us the peer evaluation at the end of the major integrated blocks - 4 times, with a "trial run a some point before the end of the block.

Our class is small (26 students). The majority of our students are Singaporean, 2 from Indonesia, 1 Philippines, 1 Malaysia, and 1 from US.  (75% were schooled here in Asia, the rest from either US, Britain, or Australia). The strategy I used for them to set the percentages was to give them an example on an excel file.  After I divided them into groups, I had the groups plug in different percentages and see how the grade was impacted.  They quickly learned that the group scores gave better results.  It is important to set a minimum for what you will permit the IRATs to be and the application, as they will generally want them to be as small as possible.  Their biggest uncertainty was how much to allocate to the GRAT and how much to the application.  Our decision (this year,may revisit next) was that the minimum for the IRAT was 20% of what ever the total of the TBL was for the course.  So, for example if you have a midterm &/or final that constitutes say 40% of the grade - and the TBL is 60%.  Then the minimum % the IRAT could be was 20% of 60 = 12%.  We also set a minimum of 10% (flat) for the Application.  So the students were guided to something like:

IRAT (min 20% of Total %)  12% - they usually took this.
GRAT (difference 60-22)    38%   
Appli (min 10% flat)       10% - often took this.

Since our first block was only 6 weeks long, and a pass/fail course, they had an opportunity to revisit this for the next block and make a new distribution. 

I also offered a suggested this type of distribution (perhaps with IRAT and Application a bit higher) as a starting point - and made them either agree or disagree.  If disagreed, they had to offer an alternative - and generally people did after looking at the excel file- until we reached consensus.  It was difficult the first time, especially since they did not have any upper classmates to guide them on what they would do.  It has become easier with each block.

It was also suggested to us that "Asian" students would not respond well to TBL or engage in debate, dialog.  That has proven to be intensely false.  It is the environment you set as well as the faculty's facilitation styles that will open or close the active engagement in the classroom.

I hope this helps.

Sandy

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Sandy Cook, PhD
Associate Dean for Curriculum Development
Duke/NUS Graduate School of Medicine



-----Original Message-----
From: Team Learning Discussion List on behalf of Christine Kuramoto
Sent: Tue 4/15/2008 2:20 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: weighting the grades

Hi all,

Thank you for all of your comments and suggestions on the RATS and IF-AT
forms!

My next question is, how often and when do you do the peer evaluations?

And further, since I'm teaching Japanese students and cuturally they may
not be very willing to help in setting up the percentages for grades
(how much weight goes to individual work, group work, exams), any
suggestions for weighting the grades that have been successful for you
would be welcome!

Christine

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Christine Kuramoto, Assistant Professor: Medical English
Kyushu University, Department of Medical Education
Faculty of Medical Sciences
3-1-1 Maidashi, Higashi-ku, Fukuoka, 812-8582 Japan
Phone: (+81)92-642-6186 Fax: (+81)92-642-6188
E-mail: [log in to unmask]