RSVP 

In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 and the sudden movement to online instruction forced many educators to consider whether the pedagogical methods and assessments that had worked in their in-person classrooms would work as effectively online. For us, our primary concern was to find ways to encourage and measure student participation. Historically, we had simply told the students we expected them to participate and then relied heavily on our own observations of the students’ engagement in class and with the course materials. As we moved online, this approach fell apart. A student could be deeply engaged and yet have their camera turned off. Another student may never raise their virtual hand, but would use the chat facility to make insightful comments on the material. It quickly became clear that our traditional norms around student participation were not valid in this online paradigm.

While our concerns about assessment began with participation, we quickly realized that what we were facing was a more general challenge: How do we motivate students to engage deeply with the material and lean into the types of classroom activities that will produce meaningful and long-lasting intellectual growth? This led us to investigate the principles upon which real, deep learning is based and create a theoretically-motivated framework for assessment design, which we call ARC. It stands for Autonomy, Reflection, and Community, and we used it to create an assessment approach that fostered student participation. With ARC, we created an environment where students are given the opportunity to take ownership of their learning, reflect on their participation, and feel motivated to collaborate, rather than compete, in a community of learners. In this talk, we will describe the ARC framework and our experience applying it to participation in a master’s level, discussion-based data science class in Spring 2021. We will also demonstrate how the ARC framework might be used in a different type of course. We will leave time toward the end of the session for the audience to explore how they might apply ARC to design their own assessments and guide their students toward intellectual growth.