Hi Jess! I enjoyed reading your post. I like how you got to present your learning in a different way as opposed to being assessed with a test. I agree with what you said about tests. I tend to think that tests are not accurate ways of assessing student learning as they are often a representation of how fast students can memorize and regurgitate information and not necessarily a way to demonstrate learning. When I was memorizing facts for tests in high school I often found that shortly after writing the test I did not remember much of what I had memorized to prepare. I do remember a lot of the projects I did in high school specifically the ones that I enjoyed much like your geology class.

From this week’s readings, I really connected with Keller’s Arcs Model. This model suggests designing learning based on 4 categories:

Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction.

I like how you described how your geology project allowed you to take your learning and apply it to the area around you thus giving it real-world significance. It is clear that this project really addresses the “Relevance” category of Keller’s Arcs Model. It was both personally relevant and meaningful to you.

Hi Vikrant! I enjoyed reading your post about your best learning experience. Thanks for sharing. I can make a connection to your experience because like your computer engineering course, I had a psychology course in my first year that offered bonus questions. Although each exam was worth 100 points (2 points per question) my professor always included 2 bonus questions to score a maximum of 104%. On one exam I was one of the few students who got more than 100%. Like yourself, I found the bonus opportunities to be motivating. I was driven to duplicate my result, thus I studied harder for each upcoming exam.