At a recent meeting with colleagues, the discussion of student workload came up. Specifically, many of us are using the best practice of creating low-stakes assignments to keep our students engaged. But if we all do this, are we overloading students?
An important distinction came up in our conversation: low stakes vs. low workload. Some interpret low stakes assignments as counting for a small percent of one’s grade. However, if this small percent takes students a significant amount of time, say two or more hours between class meetings, is it reasonable to assign such a low percentage to a significant amount of work. Or, are students spending too much time on an assignment you expected to take them 15-20 minutes?
In my calculus class for example, I have on-line daily practice four times a week. Students must complete three of the four practices (student choice), they need get only 70% correct (low stakes), and it should take 20 minutes or less (low workload). I make it clear that if they are spending more than this amount of time, something is amiss (I assigned to hard of problem?) and we should talk.
This Chronicle article, although discussing the pandemic workload, addresses many of these concerns. Moreover, it provides links to workload calculators so we can gauge how long our low stakes assignments should take, keeping the workload for our low stakes assignments in check.