The "class participation" portion of your grade will be based on the following work:
In-Class Activities: You will complete about a dozen group activities during the semester. Group activities will have a variety of formats and will be completed in groups of 2-4, depending on the activity. All members of the group will receive the same grade for the activity, so the group should strive to arrive at consensus answers. Grading for the activities will be based on this rubric:
Rubric for grading in-class activities
5 pts - complete solution, showing strong understanding and attention to detail
4 pts - complete solution, demonstrating good effort to understand the concepts
3 pts - complete or near-complete solution, demonstrating some effort
2 pts - partial solution, demonstrating only a weak effort to understand
0 pts - no solution submitted
Journal: As part of your class participation grade you are required to keep a journal in which you respond to questions about the assigned readings for the course. Those questions will be found at the Reading Questions web page (also linked from the Resources page) and are NOT the same as the questions at the end of each chapter in the textbook!! The journal must be kept in a separate 8.5 x 11 spiral notebook devoted exclusively to your entries for this assignment. All journal assignments will be posted on the Journal Archive web page (which will be updated by noon on each day that we have class), which will also indicate which journals were collected at each class meeting. While you are encouraged to discuss these assignments with others, each student must write up their own entries using their own words (copying others' summaries or using the words of the author without proper citation is plagiarism and will result in a minimum penalty of a 0 for the assignment).
This journal should be a useful resource as you prepare for exams, and will count a little more than an "hour exam" toward your final course grade (100 pts). Journals should conform to these formatting requirements:
- Write your name on the outside of the back cover of the notebook.
- Keep your entries in the order in which they were due.
- Start each journal entry on a new side of a page.
- Label the top of that page with the due date and title of the assignment (e.g. "Jan 22, Chapter 1, Q#1" or "Jan 24, Geocatastrophes").
Your journal should be brought to class every day as they will be collected randomly throughout the semester. Each person's notebook will be collected a total of five times, with the final collection for all journals being on Monday, May 7. Each notebook evaluation will be worth 20 pts and will be based on the following criteria:
- Timeliness. Notebooks submitted late will lose 5 pts per school day (M-F, or portion of a school day) that they are late (starting 15 minutes after the end of class on the day they are called for).
- Organization. Notebooks with current entries that do not fully meet the formatting requirements listed above will lose 2 pts.
- Completeness. Notebooks should have appropriate-length entries (generally at least 150-200 words) for each assignment that was due since the last time the notebook was collected, including any assignment due on the date of collection. Ten points will be awarded for completeness, with any missing or inappropriately short entries reducing the score in proportion to their percentage of the total number of questions assigned since the previous collection.
- Quality. Two current entries (due since the last time your journal was collected) will be selected for evaluation at the time of each collection, each receiving a score of 0-5. To earn full credit, each entry should provide a complete, well-organized, and thoughtful response, in your own words, to the question posed. Marks will be based on the following rubric:
5 pts - complete solution, showing strong understanding and detail
4 pts - complete solution, demonstrating good effort to understand
3 pts - complete or near-complete solution, demonstrating some effort
2 pts - partial solution, demonstrating only a weak effort to understand
0 pts - no substantial response or response addresses the wrong question
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