Participation Grades

While the portfolio represents 70% of the total course grade, 30% is reserved for participation, which can include a wide range of different kinds of activities and practices, all focused on supporting students’ ongoing presence and learning. A Spring 2022 review of 99 PWR syllabi indicated that 80% of syllabi named class discussions/group work as part of the participation grade and between 40-50% of syllabi reviewed pointed to five other elements: participation in conferences; absences/presences; peer review; informal writing; and assignment completion. It’s important that activities assessed under participation be activities that support students’ engagement with the PWR 100-Level Course Outcomes.

Students should pass the class if they submit the portfolio and all drafts for peer review on time, complete the required number of peer readings, submit all reading logs or journals, complete all required self-assessments and reflections, make use of additional resources (such as the Odegaard Writing and Research Center, the CLUE Writing Center, or the Instructional Center, when necessary), and respond with revision or rethinking to your comments and the comments of their peers.

PWR’s Recommended Participation Policy (Feel free to Copy & Paste/Adapt for your syllabus)

30% of your grade will come from your participation in our class throughout the quarter. Each element of our course’s participation grade connects with one or more of the PWR 100-level course outcomes, and there are multiple ways for you to navigate each element. As you will see below, our class participation policy emphasizes that your regular presence and involvement in class activities is important not only for your own learning, but for your classmates’. (Optional Addition: At the end of the quarter you will complete a self-reflection on your participation activities over the quarter, once again connecting those activities with the PWR 100-level Course Outcomes. We will have a class check in around participation sometime close to mid-quarter to give us a chance to think about what is working and what is not working and how we might make adjustments individually and collectively to support everyone’s learning and composing.)

• Engaging in collaborative thinking, composing, and inquiry during our class meetings along with other members of the class community as you develop your own and support others’ writing. This can take a range of forms, including but not limited to:
  • connecting with regular course activities through writing, supporting others’ contributions, speaking, listening, helping organize classroom community, and other means that we will build collectively;
  • engaging in class discussions and community-building (e.g., in writing, by speaking aloud, by synthesizing and sharing perspectives and experiences, by seeking out and sharing additional resources, and/or asking questions about and contributing perspectives on course readings and materials);
  • participating in peer review of classmates’ texts;
  • participating in Canvas discussion threads, collective annotation exercises, and other interactive aspects of our course Canvas site;
  • and/or submitting daily exit tickets.
• Actively participating in two conferences with me over the quarter and bringing to those conferences (or submitting ahead of time) draft materials ready for feedback, questions that would be most helpful for you in thinking about your next steps, and responses to peers’ and others’ feedback.
• Submitting assignments in a timely fashion throughout the quarter such that you are able to receive multiple threads of feedback from classmates and from me, as well as any other audiences you choose to engage with as you develop your ideas.

Tracking participation over the Quarter

As you design your participation framework (including how you’ll keep track of and assess participation at the conclusion of the quarter), we recommend this Teaching@UW page on promoting attendance and participation because it offers more on the UW context alongside some terrific suggestions for meaningful participation activities.

Because everyone will design their individual class meetings in ways that align with their pedagogy, course organization, and the needs of their classroom community, the policy above is intended to be broad and enable you to identify multiple ways for students to participate in an ongoing way over the course of the quarter. In keeping with universal design for learning principles, we encourage you to consider where students might have flexibility or choice in determining how they participate, and for you to design different kinds of opportunities as the quarter unfolds, both for students to practice participating in ways that fit your classroom but also to learn new strategies.

Instructors take a range of approaches to tracking participation, ranging from meticulous record keeping using an online system such as Canvas’s Grade Book, to eyeballing a sheet of checks. We encourage you to identify a system that you can readily maintain over the course of the quarter. One strategy is to have students submit “exit tickets” or some kind of in-class writing each class. You can quickly track these to have a sense of who was present and engaged in any given class meetings, to have a record of students’ presence/involvement in different course activities, and use them to support your lesson planning and any course adjustments you need to make.

We further encourage you to take some time and talk with your students about the role that participation plays in the classroom community; to check in with students who seem disengaged; and to communicate with students about what role not being present in class might mean for how they can show evidence of their participation as well as why it matters for the broader class community for them to be present and engaged.

Some tips as you design your approach to participation:

• Decide Your Strategy Early: Early on, you need to decide how you are going to grade the daily assignments your students turn in, such as in-class freewrites, short responses, and questions brought to class. You will also need to keep track of drafts and peer reviews submitted, as these factor into the participation grade. Many instructors do some form of a check, check plus, check minus system (or Canvas’s complete/incomplete option), and it is a good idea to decide how you plan to translate that into some sort of grade. Though it can be tempting to eyeball the sheet of checks and make an estimate, students do pay close attention to their course grades and if they make a grade appeal you will need to be able to clearly and transparently explain how a participation grade was determined.
  • You will generally need to keep track of at least two types of participation: (1) the various kinds of submitted assignments discussed above, and (2) various kinds of in-class activity, including speaking aloud or contributing to class discussions, supporting classroom infrastructures, taking active roles in groupwork, etc. You’ll need to develop a communicable and transparent means for keeping track of whatever aspects of your class you see as meaningful for students’ engagement with the PWR course outcomes. Will you mark daily if they participate? weekly? how do office hour visits factor in? e-mail? It’s a good idea to have these things worked out before the end of the quarter, and having a conversation with your students during conferences, or as part of a collective mid-quarter check-in can be an important way of supporting students in building their own self-assessment capacities around participation, especially if you intend to ask them to self-assess as part of their final participation grade.
• Keep Track of Class Presence: Since returning to in-person instruction in Autumn 2021, PWR instructors have been reporting higher levels of student disengagement (relative to pre-2020 experiences). One common way this disengagement manifests is in students not attending class. For a variety of reasons, UW is a non-attendance taking institution, and instructors at UW are encouraged to grade based on participation. It’s for this reason that we encourage you to design a participation policy that allows you to keep track of whether students are coming to class, but not by simply checking off whether they were a warm body in a seat. Rather, we want you to look at what kinds of things happened in your class that supported the course’s learning outcomes, and track whether and how students engage in those activities. Students have a range of reasons why they may not attend class, and for most courses, missing a class or two has a negligible impact on students’ ability to succeed in a course. But when students disengage for significant chunks of the quarter, it can be a real challenge for them to show their engagement with the course learning goals when it comes to submitting their portfolio or self-assessing participation. In the thick of a busy quarter, you may have a hard time knowing if a student has missed just a few or quite a few classes, so having some kind of exit ticket or daily in-class activity/work submission can help you maintain a sense of which students you might need to check in or communicate with. As a reminder, you are not allowed to ask students for medical notes, and we discourage instructors from having an “excused” or “unexcused” absence policy as trying to make any of these determinations about students’ choices is not a useful exercise.
• Know Your Late Policy (and stick to it): Your late policy, as stipulated in your syllabus, may also play a role in your participation grading. As there are no grades given throughout the quarter, students can sometimes feel that it doesn’t really matter if they turn in work in an ongoing way over the course of the quarter. We recommend that you develop a late policy that both protects your time as an instructor, supports students in producing work in a timely-enough fashion to get feedback from you and peers, and doesn’t add additional complexity to your assessment practice. We offer some suggestions below:
  • We don’t recommend that you deduct points for late assignments, although this is a strategy instructors sometimes use; many circumstances can affect whether a student is able to meet a particular timeline (including life circumstances, illness, their other course schedules, job commitments, and more.) Rather, we suggest that you think about what changes for you (and for the student) if an assignment comes in after a deadline, and communicate that change to the student. For instance, some instructors offer a two-day grace period for any assignment, knowing that they’re typically able to accept an assignment within that time frame and incorporate it with their other grading. In the case of missing a deadline for an in-class peer review, students can be paired with any other students who missed the deadline and asked to complete the peer review (and submit that peer review feedback to you and their peers) outside of class.
  • Another approach instructors take (especially for late-submitted major assignments) is to require students to visit office hours to get feedback, rather than composing their typical written feedback (especially given that instructors are often balancing their feedback time with other aspects of their academic schedules and their own course work and writing). Or instructors may communicate to students that their feedback on a late-submitted assignment may be briefer than it would have been if submitted on time.
• Keep Your Students Informed: Like with their final grades, students often imagine that their participation grades are higher than they actually are. You can keep them informed by discussing their progress in conference, and also by providing an indication on a draft you’re returning (maybe above their name). This can be as vague as simply indicating a “+”, “ok”, or “-”, or, if you are keeping different sorts of records, you can give some sort of percentage or ballpark grade. Additionally, if you are using Canvas’s Grade Book, you can publish your students’ individual participation grades that they can access throughout the quarter simply by logging into Canvas. You may also want to give some written commentary, such as: “I’d love to hear more from you in class,” “Thanks for participating each day!” or “Attendance is causing many missed daily assignments.” If you anticipate some students receiving a low participation grade, you’ll want to discuss those directly with them, whether by inviting them to visit office hours, checking in privately after a class meeting (not while other students are milling around or within earshot), or sending a brief email or Canvas message being transparent about what you are observing.