Technology and Stress

Name: kyle
Status: other
Grade: 9-12
Location: N/A

Question: To what extent has the use of computers affected our
stress levels? (Techno stress)
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Kyle,

I can offer anecdotal evidence.  When the technology works, it's a beautiful 
thing.  When technology gets hung up, my frustration and stress levels soar.

Its like the little boy in the children's  poem:  When he's good, he's very, 
very good.  When he's bad, he's terrible.

Warren Young
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Paul,
There are several approaches, depending on depth and on whether one event leads to 
another.  If the events are extremely dependent (e.g. unlocking the door before 
opening the door), then you must be more strict.  If the order is a result of some 
formula or relationship that the student must explain, then the explanation is most 
of the grade.

If the order is based almost exclusively on remembering the correct order, then 
examine how many you must move in order to correct the list.  Does shifting the 
item in slot seven to slot two correct the list, or is it much more complex, such 
as 3,2,5,4,1,7,6,9,8,10.  This can be corrected with 5 changes.  First, the 
inversions:
2,3,  4,5  1,  6,7  8,9  10.  Now, move 1 from the fifth slot to the first slot.  
In most cases, the fours inversions would be small errors.  Having item 1 in slot 5 
is more significant, perhaps worth more.  This method focuses on general position 
within the list.

If you want a strict rubric, this one might work:
If an item is listed some time after its predecessor, then score one point.  If an 
item is listed some time before the item that should follow, then score a point.  
If the first item is first, then score a point.  If the last item is last, then score 
a point.  This focuses on specific sequencing rather than position.

Another method I have seen involves how far the item is from its correct 
position:
correct position=10
1 from correct position = 9
2 away = 7
3 away = 3
more than 3 away=0
Of course, this must be adjusted for how many items actually exist.

There is definitely more to grading ranking tasks than multiple choice.  A ranking 
task can involve more thinking, as there are far more possible answers than in a 
multiple choice.  Fortunately, a ranking task often provides quite a bit of 
feedback.

Ken Mellendorf
Physics Professor
Illinois Central College
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My solutions are purely pragmatic and admittedly politically inspired.  You are, I 
believe, in an untenable position.  Whatever you decide to do about partial credit, 
someone is bound to feel gypped and they will complain, perhaps rightly so.

For the near term, how about making the question worth only a few points and demanding 
a perfect ordering of events for credit?  Or, you could turn it into an extra credit 
item after the fact and again demand perfection for credit.  Lastly, you could be a 
"hard nose", leave the question as is and give no partial credit whatsoever.  Of 
course, you might also have to curve the exam to head off a wholesale student/parent 
rebellion.

Next time, accomplish your goal with several smaller questions about the relative 
position of each item in the sequence such as, "If listed in order from oldest to 
most recent, which of these four items would be listed first?" Or, "Which of the two 
groups of events occurred before the other?"  Perhaps even, "Which event below did not 
occur in the same century as the other three?"

Another way would be to ask your students to parse items.  "Which events in the list 
above occurred before the invention of the airplane?" Or, "Which of these events 
resulted from Isaac Newton's three Laws of Motion?"

You might also list six or seven of the events in the correct order and ask students 
to insert the remaining three or four in their correct places in the list.  That would 
provide wrong and right answers that would be easily defensible.

Bob Avakian
Oklahoma State University
Institute of Technology
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Paul,

Good question!  Personally, I would argue that these questions have no value on tests 
because there is no learning value to the student and on top of that, there is no good 
or easy way for teachers to grade them consistently across all students.  I do provide 
a partial solution at the end so please bare with me.  Again, please take this as my 
personal opinion, but is history really about memorizing dates and the order of when 
events happened, or is it learning about what the causes were of what happened during 
that time?  I agree that the order of events is important to understand why things 
happened, but actually testing by ordering events is more of a test on the student's 
abilities in Logic than it is in History.

One core issue is that if you try to establish a set of logical rules that define when 
a student is right and when he is wrong, the more a student gets wrong, the more 
potential there is to have points where rules overlap and you cannot measure what the 
student's true intent was.  This becomes more of a problem the longer a sequence is 
because there are more opportunities to mess up.  I will explain this more fully with 
some examples in the paragraphs below, but first a couple of personal experiences that 
had very different outcomes.

I had a Physical Chemistry teacher that would give 2 question exams, but each question 
had like 8-15 parts.  The later parts all were dependent on the earlier answers, so if 
you got the first part wrong, it would subsequently make it all wrong--unless by some 
freak accident you messed it up again and made it correct ;)  Anyway, he would only 
mark wrong the parts in which you actually performed incorrect math.  And if you 
performed the next series of steps correctly (with the wrong initial number), he would 
give you credit. I think that any type of question like that should be graded in 
similar fashion because the goal should be to test knowledge of each small part, not 
to assure mastery of the entire sequence.  It then becomes unfair and unfruitful to 
mark a student wrong for many things when they only made one mistake early on.

One guideline might be to see if you can break up the whole into smaller parts and 
then to grade those smaller parts for their own merit.

As another example, I had a 7th grade social studies teacher that gave us a test on 
the capitols of the US states.  I only missed one state (PA, I put Philly) but I ended 
up with a 50% on the exam because I spelled half of the capitols wrong.  My mother 
(a HUGE English buff) argued in my behalf that even though spelling was important, 
the exam was testing my knowledge of the state capitols (which I had), not on spelling 
(which I did not have).  I ended up with a 50% :(

Another guideline might be to define what the goal of the question or exam is and then 
base your grading off of that--AND make that expectation clear to your students if 
spelling counts!  I had no clue that it counted until after the exam.

I find it easy to use examples to use as the basis for formation of a set of rules, so 
I will do that and present you with a bunch of scenarios so that you can derive your 
own set of rules.  Let us say that the task is to name the first four US presidents 
in order.  Simply for reference, the correct sequence is Washington, Adams, Jefferson, 
Madison.

1. If the student puts Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, they interposed Adams and 
Jefferson.  There are two logical signs that you could use to determine grading here.  
One might think the student should miss two points for this because because 
A) Jefferson was not the second president and Adams was not the third president.

Another reason is because 
B) Jefferson did not follow Washington and Adams did not follow Jefferson.  But then 
you have to carry this one step further and say the next logical statement would be, 
"well Madison did not follow Adams, so that should be wrong as well"  BUT, Madison 
was in fact the 4th president, so the student should get a point for this.  One could 
arrive at a rule that the problem is an interchange of two answers, so two points 
should be marked off.

2. However, if the student put Jefferson, Washington, Adams and Madison, it might be 
apparent that the student knew three of the four.  He did not know where Jefferson 
should go and should be marked wrong for that point.  Even though Washington was not 
our second president etc, the ordering is correct for the rest of them.  And even 
though Madison did not come directly after Adams, the student would be poor indeed 
if he or she tried to use the same president twice or to put eleven answers where 
there are only ten lines.  The problem here is misplacement of a single answer, so 
only one point should be marked off.

This is where forming logical rules like this then start causing issues.  If we keep 
rule 2 in mind and apply it to situation 1, then you can simply say that if I just put 
Jefferson in the right spot, then everything is fixed and I should only mark off one 
point.  Here are two seemingly simple and logical rules, yet they conflict with each 
other in a the very simple case of 4 ordered items.  Just to note, there is a very fine 
distinction between the two rules.  In the first example, the interjection was between 
adjacent members of the sequence, where in the second example, it is an interjection 
between non-adjacent members of the sequence.

You can decide if you will take off 1 point for each error or two and then grade on 
the basis of how many moves it takes to get to the correct sequence.  This again, has 
issues, however, because the longer the list the more possible combinations of moves 
that are available to correct the sequence.  How can you be sure that you are using as 
few moves as possible.  It then becomes an exercise in logic for YOU!

Have I convinced you to not put these types of questions on exams yet?  If not, keep 
reading ;)

Is your goal to get them to list the correct sequence, or know exactly when something 
happened.  Let's say that you want them to match events with dates.  

1914 = WWI, 1929 = Great Depression, 1939 = WWII, 1942 = Pearl Harbor.  

If the student mixes up then the most logical grading is to mark every incorrect answer 
wrong, regardless of whether the rest of the sequence of events is correct.  But again, 
the core issue here is that the student is confined in his ability to answer these 
types of questions because of the boundaries of logic.  If the student was able to 
deduce that WWI and the Great Depression were during 1914 and 1929, but could not 
remember which was first, should he be marked off two points, or one?  You cannot 
tell the intent of the student from this format--i.e. if the student was able to 
isolate the two events and then guessed incorrectly, or if the student actually 
wrongly believed those dates were correct.  Does one intent deserve partial credit and 
the other does not?  If so, there is no way for you to tell.  Conversely, if the 
question was to write the dates for each event and the student knew the relative 
order, but didn't remember any of the exact dates, does giving him zero points 
accurately reflect what the student knows?  I do not think it does.

It is still ultimately the teacher's choice to use these types of questions though, 
and as I said in the very beginning, I have a partial solution if you do choose to 
use them.  The solution is to break the ordering up from one major list into much 
smaller subsections so that the rules never conflict.  You can only do this with 
groups of two or three, as shown below:

1.  Take two events per question and have them order which came first.  Either they get 
1 point, or they do not, there is no partial credit.

2.  Take three events per question and have them ordered.  For a subset of three, they 
could get either 0 (none correct), 1 (one correct) or 2 (all correct) points.

For an example, let's take the sequencing of the numbers 1,2 and 3.  There are 6 
possible combinations:
123   (2pt)
132   (1pt)
213   (1pt)
231   (0pt)
312   (0pt)
321   (1pt)

If you score points like this, you give your students 1/3 chance to get 0 points, 50% 
chance to get 1 point and 17% chance to get 2 points.  In my opinion, this is a better 
test of a student's knowledge because it has one extra gradation instead of offering 
students a "coin-flip".  Notice I did not give a correct sequence of three a total of 
three points.  This is because you are essentially either double rewarding the correct 
answer, or double punishing the wrong answer--however you wish to look at it.  You can 
never have two correct, only zero, one or three in the right order.

Anyway, that is my spiel.  Take it or leave it!  My last comment is that if you choose 
to put questions like this on your exam, then limit them to 5-10% of the total grade.

Matt Voss
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