From: Jon Irish <jonathan.irish@houghton.edu>
To: Teacher2Teacher Service
Date: May 01, 2001 at 12:03:30
Subject: The effect of consistent evaluation on student morale

I am a math and secondary education major at Houghton College.  In my
Discrete Math class my professor believes in continual evaluation of skills
and uses methods of almost-weekly homework, as well as quizzes at the same
frequency. He says that it is so we, the students, can continually assess
how we are learning the material.  He also encourages us to work together
on our homework assignments in order to further our understanding. Help
sessions are available to us if we have questions.  I like this method and
think that it has been very helpful in assisting my learning.

My question entails two parts.  First, would encouraging students to work
together to enhance learning of material be beneficial in a high school
setting or would it cause the students to be lazy and rely on others to do
the work?  Secondly, if a student does poorly on this constant evaluation,
would it be devastating to their morale and actually destroy their desire
to learn? (Note, I feel that both of these aspects of the class I am
taking are beneficial to my learning experience.)

Thanks for your time

Jon Irish

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