Journey to a PhD – The Renegade Coder

As promised in my recent teaching reflection, I decided to finally go through all of the assignment feedback to help prepare for next semester. The goal of this task is to look through the assignment feedback over the last semester in hopes of finding useful suggestions that I can incorporate into my work. Let's get into it! Data Dump To start, I figured I'd start by dumping various comments students have made throughout the semester here. The idea is that this should give a good overview of the types of issues students were having and how I might improve them next semester. To make this a bit less painful, I'll be breaking things out into sections based on the type of feedback. To start, we'll look at rubric feedback. Rubric Feedback In the assignment surveys, I asked students to tell me how the project rubrics could be improved. All of the assignment data is aggregated, so I can't easily tell which project a comment might belong to. That said, the sentiment is all that really matters. Let's start! Little more detail More specific on what is being looked for More details on what is expected in test cases Having more specific things that are being looked for Kind of vague more clear with what we need to create, enter, output Okay, so that's easy! The rubrics are good, but they could use more detail. Let's move on to checklist feedback. Checklist Feedback With each project, I provided a checklist, so students wouldn't forget to turn things in. In general, students were very happy about this, but I'm sure there are some gripes. Let's take a look. A little more detailed instructions on how to add the titles, and examples on how it would look when done properly more clear answer about which type of wrong cannot have more clear about what kind of result should we get slightly more specific could be more specific Again, easy enough! Students seem to be happy with both the rubrics and the checklists. They just seem to benefit even more by being more specific or clear. Let's look at the type of resources students use to get their work done. Resource Feedback One of the things I struggle with as an educator is recommending outside resources. Typically, I just make my own and share them. That said, I'm certain students use other resources. Let's see exactly which ones: The textbook The book opensource.com to learn about markdown, google for definitions of terms Textbook, previous knowledge W3schools The checklist, rubric and W3 The project assignment page and the rubric. Discord Chat, the project outline Eclipse, CSE Page, checklist The class slides and the password checker lab. Natural Number API From this list, there's nothing too wild being used. I will say that knowing that students are referring to their previous work is really exciting. I might include some of this previous work directly in the checklists, so students know where to look. Task Planning Coming out of the semester, I already had a list of tasks that I wanted to complete heading into the fall. Most of these tasks I track on a private GitHub repository, so I'll list out some of those tasks here: Reminder to put in the Project 10 checklist that it's okay if methods are too longAdd Debrief in Final SlidesFix Bugs in View SlidesFix Power Method Homework 11Add Expression Tree Generator on ChecklistFix Divideby2 Solution in HomeworkAdd Review Questions to Every SlideshowMake a How to Do Well DocumentInclude Definitions in FileInclude Plagiarism in Next SlidesAdd Icebreakers to JigsawAdd More Info to Slides Before Exam 1Add Resources to Existing ChecklistsExtend Existing Rubrics to Allow for Additional Activities In addition to these issues, I think I'm going to make a blanket update to all the checklists and rubrics, so they're a bit more explicit. I also want to add the emotions and list of resources to each checklist. Otherwise, it looks like we're coasting into the fall! You know what that means? More time to crank out this dissertation proposal... With that said, I don't have much else to say. Let's call this one a wrap. If you want to read more like this article, check out some of the related content: 5 Ways to Get Feedback on Your TeachingI Won the Graduate Associate Teaching Award!Managing People Is Hard And if that's not enough, you're always welcome to support the site a bit more. I'm not stopping ya! Otherwise, take care.