Post 324: What is "Low Stakes Grading?"

What is Low Stakes Grading?

Scott Warnock states that "Frequent Low Stakes Grading (FLS) is a process in which students receive many small grades. This strategy is important because in an online writing class (OWC), as students work on lots of small writing assignments, FLS grading helps students learn their way into the (digital) environment." (Warnock, 7).

Warnock introduces the idea of low stakes grading in his book, Writing Together, Then Weeks of Texting and Studenting Writing Course. The next few blog posts will be about topics from this book!

 

Therefore, every forum post for Warnock is considered a small writing assignment. With the FLS system, college students who are used to a face to face class gradually get used to a digital environment without sacrificing their grade. 

As students write their papers, they do small composition tasks like learning how to choose a topic, learning how to narrow a topic, learning how to write a thesis statement,  doing group projects, learning about the nature of an argument and they learn each skill incrementally until it builds up into writing their academic research paper. While using FLS, students do as many as 3 or more discussion forum post thread activities a week.

Each week's forums are moderated by a student moderator who is responsible for all the threads for that week. I will discuss more about the use of student moderators in another blog post.

For each FLS, Warnock uses rubrics so that students know what criteria are expected for each writing assignments. In his class, all the small writing assignments like all the forum posts, projects, and papers all add up to the final grade.  Only the big projects like the 2 Composition Projects are worth a lot of points. Here is the breakdown of Warnock's ENGL 102 class:

Composition Project 1 200 points

Composition Project 2 220 Points

Project 2 Project Proposal and Research Plan 50 points

Project 2 Annotated Bibliography 50 points

Portfolio and Reflective Analysis 50 points

Informal Writing (Forums)  350 points

Quizzes 50 points

Partcipation 20 points

As I read the book though, it seems that the meat of the class was in the Discussion Forums. It is in the DQ forums that students get together to discuss these projects and work together to get these projects done. Warnock uses 15 different kinds of Discussion Forum posts to move his OLC forward. I will discuss these different kinds of Discussion Forum post in future blog posts. 

Instead of the traditional face to face class where students take a monthly test, write 2 papers and then take a final exam to pass a 16 week writing class, (like the writing class I took in college), Warnock breaks down his grading into many small writing assignments to add up to one big project. This approach to teaching writing is known as the Writing Process. It is a portfolio approach to writing where students write many drafts, peer review these drafts with each other before submitting the final draft to the assignment portal for final grading.

By having so many small FLS grades, the teacher has many more chances to give students frequent feedback on each step of the writing process. For instance, the teacher can give feedback on how to choose a topic, how to revise and narrow that topic, how to compose a thesis statement and this more informal style of grading is better than the product approach to writing where the student writes a paper (product) and the teacher just gives a grade (sometimes with feedback and sometimes without feedback depending on the college professor.).

Not only do students get feedback from the teacher many times with FLS, but students learn how to give each other feedback thus reinforcing the students' core concepts of the Writing Process.  I highly recommend reading Scott's book if you are new to teaching online writing.

Another reason this book blew me away is that the book provides two perspectives, that of the teacher, Scott Warnock of Prof. W and that of the student Diana Gaiewski. Diana gives the student perspective as she takes the online writing class recording her impressions, struggles, feelings, triumphs, as she is taking Scott's class.  I will go more into Diana's reaction in future blog posts!

Warnock, Scott. Writing Together. Ten Weeks of Teaching and Studenting in an Online Writing Course