Motivating Students towards Learning through their Notebooks and Assessment of their Exam Papers

It is of every teacher’s role to make it sure that each student has his or her own pace and space of classwork.

However, how many of us (teachers) take into account the necessity of looking at student’s notebooks?

  • as part of the subjective evaluation of academic performance and
  • objective evaluation as the core part of the grading system

Let’s examine how should a teacher give remarks to each student’s pile of lesson notes and a series of written examinations?

Help them to create Notebooks

First, at the beginning of the semester, the teacher needs to require each student to have a notebook for each subject matter.

I myself have done this maintenance of a proper, neat, organized lesson notebook.

For example: instruct the students to have the first page of the notebook written with a course outline that is, every unit topic is written as a complete guide for classwork throughout the semester.

It should follow the all other course requirements such as

  • projects
  • quizzes
  • participation in class and extra-curricular events of the Math Course
  • complete lesson notes
  • midterm and final exam with each corresponding marks indicated therein

For the purposes of making and motivating them to create and nicely presented lecture notes, give a generous percentage of marks to notebook assessment at the end of the semester.

As the term goes along, the teacher needs to collect notebooks weekly on a regular basis and check

  • their writing
  • word problems build-up
  • solutions resolved and
  • neatness
  • accuracy and
  • the organized heading of lessons attended in class

This way, a teacher must indicate generous check remarks and commendable comments.

One of my students’ Notebook presentation of Lesson write up

The notebook owner feels so excited to see how the teacher passionately reacts on his or her class notes artwork, writing and accuracy of content written thereat.

The teacher must give an objective remark from her or his subjective evaluation of the student’s notebook.

Thereby, marks will add up and accumulate until the end of the period.

Making the Exam Papers of students a motivating factor

Secondly, the exam papers are used to assess the students’ understanding of the subject matter.

Usually, the questions are knowledge-based and check problem-solving skills.

Each question is graded objectively.

Questions and problems solving formed in the exam papers are supposed to be based on the lesson presented and the objectives measured.

As educators, we are expected to make exam papers very valid and need to be created according to the set standards.

Therefore, a teacher gives an objective remark on every students’ score gained form the written exam.

It’s better to put a qualitative remark with the percentage mark obtained as it forms a sense of satisfaction by the student receiving the evaluation from his written exam.

For example, remark 75%-80% mark from a unit quiz as very good, 81%-85% as outstanding, etc.

Although, the teacher has never been getting much free time during school hours.

Instead, he/she is spending more time into remarking the learning of the students, spending time to read notebooks with passion, and marking each exam papers looking at the objective and/or subjective evaluation outcome of their classwork.

-Learn and yearn with fun @ RA Academy-

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