Student Nurture - DGPE Spring 2021

It’s an unfortunate fact that most of the students don’t get a single comment or tip on their projects on Khan Academy. This must be especially hard this year when
so many students already feel isolated from their peers! For some of them, asking for help from the community is a big step. Others are unaware of the mistakes they are making,
and carry on in the same vein. If they don’t have a coach they risk finishing the course without being aware of their issues.

Fortunately, some students have been working hard to change that! During a 9 day period at the end of March/beginning of April, Doing Great Project Evaluations (DGPE) organized a reach-out where participating students:

• Were taught feedback skills for Intro to JS projects
• Were invited to attend workshops about coding skills
• Offered feedback on official DGPE projects to other KA students
• Helped hunt cases of plagiarism and inappropriate projects

Altogether, our team of learners and peer teachers provided feedback on 808 projects. Additionally, the reported 200 cases of plagiarized projects.

The participants were instructed to skip projects which had already received relevant feedback, so those 808 were largely projects which had neither been voted up or had any messages on them.

An0n3m0us also created a program for keeping track of feedback on official projects.

All of these students spent at least 1-2 hours, often considerably more, on the project tasks. We also had a few students who did not have the time to complete the requirement for participation, but still delivered projects. The students you contacted will appreciate your effort (even if they are silent about it), and so do we!

Are you familiar with the ideas of Adam Grant, organizational psychologist? A few years ago he gave a TED talk ‘Are you a giver or a taker?’ and the advantages of identifying and
retaining givers in the work place.

To those of you who put in more than 1-2 hours supporting other students or helping organize the event: You’ve all shown yourself as givers during this project.

To those of you who put in less, there could be numerous of legitimate reasons for it. And if you think like a giver, there is no reason to stop helping others once the project is over.

On behalf of DGPE,

Inger Hohler, Evan Lewis, and Chris Rennick