Extracurricular-Counterfactual-Assignment

Extracurricular Counterfactual Renewable Assignment

This page hosts the “Extracurricular counterfactual” Renewable Assignment. This assignment is connected to the research project on open co-curricular practices (OCP); for more see Open Co-Curricular Practices OSF page.

Overview

• This Assignment has two parts: (i) the creation/product, and (ii) the comprehension questions.
• Implementation by the instructor follows 7 steps.
• Students complete the assignment by following 6 steps.

Steps for the Instructor:

1. Engage current students with previous students’ work (that are renewed/non-disposed)
   • First, you will show your students with the previous students’ work. They will observe the creation/product and then answer the comprehension questions which apply theory to said creation.
2. Decide on group vs. individual
   • Second, you must decide on whether the assignment will be completed individually or in groups. This decision is based on your specific context, and account for factors such as course learning goals, class culture, course modality, and more. The decision can be made with the class, which is why it may help for them to have engaged with previous students’ work already.
3. Explain assignment
   • Third, you must explain the assignment.
     • Start by introducing the concepts of counterfactuals and non-disposable (renewable) assignments (see below).
     • Then, you will introduce the creative task, which is the first half of the assignment; there are 3 options: comic strip, choose-your-own-adventure, and interview script (more details below).
     • Next, you will explain the comprehension questions, which are the second half of the assignment that makes the explicit connections to theory.
     • Then, you will explain the feedback process which can vary depending on whether they are in groups.
4. Release assignment
   • Release the assignment for students to complete
5. Give Preliminary Feedback
   • Peer feedback: Students will give each other feedback either individually or as a group (or if assignments are done in groups, peer feedback could be optional)
   • Instructor feedback: Students will receive preliminary feedback from you to make improvements and a polished product
6. Mark Assignments
   • Assign a grade, which can account for both before and after receiving the instructors feedback such that it reflects their initial effort as well as their effort in response to your feedback.
   • You may also elect to mark students’ accuracy in completing the comprehension questions from previous students’ work, even if weighted less, to incentivize engagement and recall.
7. Store the assignments for a future class
   • This is what makes it a renewable assignment!
   • This part may require connecting with departmental support staff if you are not guaranteed to be teaching the course again.

Steps for Students:

1. Examine one of the products/creations from previous classes and answer the comprehension questions
2. Choose story and creative form.
3. Create the product
4. Create comprehension questions
5. Make adjustments based on feedback
6. Submit!

Introducing Counterfactuals and Renewable Assignments

What is a Counterfactual?

Counterfactuals refer to alternative timelines or alternate histories. For example, a famous counterfactual that serves as the basis for a television show is For All Mankind, which depicts an alternative world where the Soviet Union, not the United States, won the space race in the 1960s, sparking escalation, as opposed to de-escalation, of competition between countries and complexities of the Cold War. The single event has a cascading effect on how history would unfurl in this alternative universe. Aside from being an interesting basis for fictional work, counterfactuals also serve as an intellectual tool for scholars, similar to a thought experiment, insofar as they examine the phenomenon of interest from purely a hypothetical/speculative standpoint (Wenzlhuemer, 2009). To this extent, counterfactuals can also serve as a basis for educational activities, as is the case with this assignment.

Retrieved from: Pinterest

What is a Renewable Assignment?

Oftentimes, school assignments have little to no purpose or function other than to demonstrate a student’s knowledge to their instructor at a single point in time. Hours of time may be spent by the student to complete the assignment, only to then be submitted at which point in time the instructor will spend x number of minutes marking it, but then the assignment will become nearly useless afterward. Yes, it is true that the student can refer back to the assignment for the purposes of studying for an exam, but scholars and educators alike are increasingly recognizing the need to replace this suboptimal practice, deemed the ‘disposable assignment,’ with the ‘non-disposable’ or ‘renewable assignment,’ which consists of assignments with much richer functionality and purpose beyond the single point of course evaluation. One research work posits the following about this situation:

“What if we changed these ‘disposable assignments’ into activities which actually added value to the world? Then students and faculty might feel different about the time and effort they invested in them” (Wiley, 2013, para 4).

For more on non-disposable/renewable assignments, see: Seraphin et al. (2019).

The Extracurricular Counterfactual

The counterfactual can be found at the following link: Click here

Assignment Part 1: the Creative Task

Three Options:

1. Choose Your Own Adventure
2. Time-split Comic Strip
3. Podcast Interview with The Same Person From Two Timelines

1. Create A Choose Your Own Adventure:

1. Plan out the short story multi-part plot which includes one timeline before the time disruption and multiple timelines afterward from which the reader will be able to choose.
2. Write out the short story (using imagery and character development to the extent your students are comfortable)
3. Separate the choosable segments of the adventure with clear headings

2. Create A Comic Strip:

1. Plan out each boxes in point form at first
2. When you know the number of boxes before and after the timeline split, then draw the whole set of boxed with a ruler
3. Always start with pencil first, and use marker/pen/pencil crayon later.
4. Pen is best for speech bubbles and the text within unless you want to dramatize certain words with bold, coloured letters (like WOW!)

Example formats:

Short version

Long version

Note: Expectations for length can depend on the artistic ability of your students as well as how major the assignment is.

3. Podcast Interview Script

1. Write out the details of a character in two parallel timelines: one from the counterfactual and one from our reality
2. Write out a script for a podcaster interviewing both characters at the same time who have been able to come onto the podcast due to inter-dimensional travel; the podcaster is interested in finding out the differences and similarities between that character in both timelines
3. *Optional: if interested, record a recitation of the podcast interview script to create an audiofile

Assignment Part 2: Comprehension Questions

To better infuse course content, and to align with other renewable assignments (e.g., where students create their own quiz questions), the students will make a couple of comprehension questions that evaluate the connection between their creation and theories of learning/development. The questions can be in the form of multiple choice, true/false, short or long answer (or combination thereof).

Examples of theories to connect:

• Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and Scaffolding
• Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory and Bioecological Theory
• Bandura’s social learning theory
• Bloom’s Taxonomy of higher-order thinking

Feedback Process

Fundamental to non-disposable assignments, by way of alignment with open pedagogy, is information collaboration and exchange (Seraphin et al., 2019). Therefore, if this assignment is implemented as an individual assignment, as opposed to a group assignment, then students should still be expected to share their product with peers to receive feedback. This peer feedback can offer constructive criticism both in the application of course material and/or the engagement/accessibility of the creation. After this point, the student can have a chance of making revisions before submitting. Then, following submission, they will receive feedback from the instructor (and possibly a grade) which can then be used for making revisions once again before the creation is reposited for future classes. If this assignment has been implemented as a group assignment, then there is the option to skip the peer feedback stage and go right to submitting to the instructor to receive feedback, although it still is possible to have a group peer feedback stage if time allows.

References

Rémy, D. (n.d.). Debating societies. The Digital Encyclopedia of British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century [Online encyclopedia entry]. https://www.digitens.org/en/notices/debating-societies.html

Seraphin, S. B., Grizzell, J. A., Kerr-German, A., Perkins, M. A., Grzanka, P. R., & Hardin, E. E. (2019). A conceptual framework for non-disposable assignments: Inspiring implementation, innovation, and research. Psychology Learning & Teaching, 18(1), 84-97. https://doi.org/10.1177/1475725718811711

Wenzlhuemer, R. (2009). Counterfactual thinking as a scientific method. Historical Social Research, 34(2), 27-56. https://doi.org/10.12759/hsr.34.2009.2.27-56

Wiley, D. (2013). What is open pedagogy? Retrieved from: https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2975.