Hello Keri,

I had two classes I taught TBL style. In research methods, a face-to-face class, contained a student who had requested some accommodations. I spoke with our campus office and with the student. We negotiated what we could do for this student…which pretty much ended up being the original class set-up for the iRATs. I checked in with this student after the first few iRATs and the student indicated that things were fine. 

In my other (statistics) class, I had 2/3 participating as distance students in a synchronous fashion. Since I really had little control over those students’ quiz environment, I started allowing certain individuals to take the iRAT early and I even started allowing open-book for all the class. But I continued having a period of time in-class when they would take the iRAT together (as the online quiz was password protected).

The timing was set up for both classes so that all members of a team had to finish before the team could indicate that they were done, and then I waited until 2 teams were done before I gave everyone else 5 minutes to complete. Walking around the room, it seemed like that pretty much gave everyone in the class plenty of time to complete the test, and the team containing the person needing accommodation was not necessarily the last team done.

Hope this helps.

Best,

Vanessa

p.s. This semester, I’m going to adapt TBL components and combine it with the “flipped classroom” and some other techniques. I’m going to move “iRATs” completely out of the classroom as open-book, closed peer “preparation quizzes” which should be completed while reading. I’ll try to design questions that help students focus on and reinforce the important parts of the reading. They would not be able to find the answer verbatim in the text and would need to think a bit about the implications of the reading material to be able to answer the questions. A student suggested this idea, and I thought I’d give it a try since it would still serve the same purpose…namely, ensuring that the students are prepared to conduct the in-class application activities. (There is still have a team quiz in class.)  In addition to freeing up class time, I also could make these quizzes due 30 hours before class, so I will have a heads-up on what students are not understanding before class starts, and I can get earlier notice of student misconceptions. Thus, I could prepare to address those issues during class (or in the video micro-lectures that they can watch on their online course site). I expect that this would be a set up that would be more helpful to the slow readers and test takers, including my international & ESL students. We’ll see if this experiment works to improve students’ reading comprehension and satisfaction.

From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Keri M Larson
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2013 11:45 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Need advice on accommodating disability support requirements for test-taking

Hello,

Tomorrow I will commence my second semester of teaching Intro to IS, full-on TBL-style. Just this morning, however, a student who will be in one of my classes presented me with his Disability Support Services letter from my University requiring that I give him double time on tests and allow him to take his tests outside of the classroom environment. 

This puts me in a huge bind. I cannot (nor do I wish to!) revamp my class in one day to accomodate this student's requirements. Has anyone encountered this situation before, and how did you (or do you think I should) handle the IRAT/TRAT situation in this context? 

Thanks for any advice! 

Keri Larson

Assistant Professor of IS

University of Alabama at Birmingham