Although twenty-six instructors are registered with the
Engrade administrative stub, only 21 were active users spring 2014. These 21 instructors served 895 students in 71 classes spring 2014.
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| Engrade dashboard |
Engrade reports that of the 895 students, 211 students are failing classes.Engrade provides performance data across multiple terms for three broad performance bands.
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| Engrade performance brackets |
The student performance numbers, which apparently reflect individual assignment performance rather than course level performance, indicates that 149 students are failing. Some of this difference from the 211 students may be due to the weighting of assignments in the class grade. 279 students (31%) have missing assignments. Missing work is likely to be a contributing factor to course failure.
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| Student performance as tracked by Engrade |
The student performance bar chart suggests that spring 2014 relative performance was on par with spring 2013.
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| Student performance as area percentage chart |
The uppermost bracket, performance above 80%, was 41.7% spring 2014 and 45.5% spring 2013. Performance in this bracket fall 2013 was 45.5%. Summer 2013 saw the strongest performance at 54.8%. Spring 2014 has a standard error of 1.8% suggesting that while the drop in performance from both the prior spring and fall was small, the drop was significant. Drops in performance have potential impacts for course completion, persistence, retention, and ultimately budgets. Confounding interpretation of the results is the increasing sample size as more instructors use Engrade.
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| Attendance chart |
Attendance data is more difficult to analyze due to the wide variety of attendance marks that instructors have chosen to use. Engrade has presets of capital P for present, capital A for absent, and capital T for tardy. I choose to use a capital E for an excused absence. Some of the alternative marks include lowercase variants, W, East, HOLI, Holi, Good, eAST, WWi, and others. Engrade will tally any mark an instructor chooses, and holidays actually do not need to be marked. Leaving a column or cell blank causes Engrade to ignore that cell.
The graph will not display if the first two weeks of classes are included due to the variety of marks at term start. The following image includes the first two weeks of class in the totals.
As a rough estimate, 3116/27310 suggests an absenteeism rate of 11% in classes that tracked attendance. Of interest is that these absences were accumulated by 539 students, with 595 students being marked present. 3116/539 suggests that for students who were absent, they averaged 5.8 absences. The data also leaves open the possibility that 56 students had no absences.
Engrade provides a non-random, potentially biased insight into the engine room of performance - instructors grade book data. Only a subset of instructors uses Engrade and these instructors are self-selected, willing adopters of new technologies. Whether the negative trends seen in successful student performance are broader is unknown but concerning nonetheless. With goals of increasing learning, course completion, persistence, and retention, negative trends in performance even among a subset of classes suggests that more will have to be done to reverse the trends.
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