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Although student responses will vary, our observations suggest the specific grading policies do not make very much difference to students as long as one avoids the extremes that result in undesirable outcomes listed above. As long as there are consistent implicit messages from the instructor that the questions matter, students seem to take the questions reasonably seriously.
Regardless of grading scheme, some clicker questions should NOT be graded for the “correct” response but are very useful in promoting discussion, student learning, and instructor and student feedback. Examples of such questions are those with more than one potentially correct response, and those intended to elicit student misconceptions or students’ prior knowledge.
We also highly recommend that whatever grading policy is used, a certain number (2-3) of “free” days are allowed. These are days for which the student will get credit even if there are no clicker responses recorded for them. This greatly reduces the time student and instructor need to spend dealing with complaints/excuses about clicker not working, being forgotten, missing class due to any number of catastrophic events beyond students control, etc. An alternative that is similar in concept is to set a certain percentage of questions students need to answer, such as 80 or 90%, and once above that threshold they receive “maximum clicker credit”. We have also seen that when clickers count for more than 15% of the grade, the amount of time spent dealing with student concerns about being sure they receive credit for clicker responses can get annoying. Finally we recommend that at the beginning of the course you should very clearly announce that use of another person’s clicker, or having someone use your clicker, is considered cheating with the same policies applying as would be the case for turning in illicit written work.
| Common grading policy | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| Equal credit for correct and incorrect responses (e.g. 2 pts per response or 2 pts total per class) | - Promotes balanced peer discussion, ideas put forth evenly from both partners
- Promotes a safe environment for students to answer what they honestly think rather than answering what they think the instructor wants. |
- Less incentive to pay attention, think through a question, and commit to an answer. |
| More credit for correct responses, some credit for any response (e.g. 3 pts correct / 2pts incorrect) | - More incentive to pay attention and actively work out an answer if the question is graded. | - Students may feel pressured to get the right answer, less incentive to share own reasoning and answer honestly.
- Promotes unbalanced peer discussion, more knowledgeable students can dominate discussion. - Promotes memorization of answers from previous terms. - Not appropriate for all types of questions. |
| Mixed: Many participation-only questions, some graded questions. (e.g. 2 pts per class for participation + 1 pt on graded questions if correct) | - Promotes process and reasoning of figuring out answer.
- Allows flexibility to grade only questions that are summative assessments. - Having some graded questions keep students’ attention. |
- More set-up or post-analysis to identify which are graded and which are participation only (is fairly easy with some clicker software, not with some others). |
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