Assessing student participation
Suggestions on how to shift participation grades to reflect students’ learning, as well as more inclusive ways to engage students in class.
What counts as participation?
While it’s true that students can’t participate in a synchronous class without attending, attendance in and of itself is not an assessment task, so you might consider thinking about what students need to do to earn participation grades in your course. Ideally, all grades should be tied to the assessment of student learning.
- Clarify verbally and/or on the course syllabus what your expectations are around participation, how grades are earned and how participation is tied to learning. This will likely be new for students so it’s worth taking the time to clarify these points.
- Share the assessment criteria with them (and the rubric, if you have one). Review example rubrics for assessing student participation, including one used at Concordia for students to self-assess their participation in class.
- Ask students to weigh in on the assessment criteria on participation or to self-assess their participation.
- Vary the types of activities that count as participation to help make them more inclusive. Learn more about applying Universal Design in Learning (UDL) in assessments.
Submitting written questions
Have students write their questions before, during or after the lecture or teaching activity. Written questions (submitted in writing class, on a discussion board or Moodle forum or a MS Forms tool) can be referenced at the beginning of the next class to review or clear up misunderstandings, allowing you to gauge students’ learning. Three techniques for collecting artifacts from students are:
To keep things simple, have students always submit in the same format whether on paper, a poll or a Moodle quiz or discussion board.
In class group work
Ask students to discuss an idea or work on a problem in pairs or small groups during class and jot down main ideas, takeaways or potential solutions. Walk around to get a sense that all are engaging and, that day at least, all attendees get a participation mark for group work and/or the submission of the artifact. One way to run this is as a Think-pair-share activity.
Sharing lecture notes
Have students work in pairs on their lecture or class notes during a portion of class time. To track participation, students submit their shared notes on Moodle and receive full marks for their submission. You don’t need to review or grade the submitted notes, simply give a participation grade to those who completed the activity. This strategy can help motivate students to come to class, engage with the course content and foster peer learning. Learn how to run Note-taking pairs.
Explore more tips on assessing participation from Concordia faculty members in this blog post.
Make participation completion based
The suggestion to make participation entirely completion based comes from Lucy Appert (2025) at NYU. We’ve summarized and adapted key recommendations below, but be sure to review A Hybrid Approach to Alternative Grading for all the details. Visit our resource on alternative grading methods to learn more about taking the focus off grades.
As a grading category, participation is often poorly defined for students, with little guidance beyond general expectations that students be in class, come prepared and engage with their professor and peers. And yet participation often holds considerable weight in final course grades. This is generally because instructors want to signal to students the importance of coming to class, keeping up with course materials and sustaining their effort over time, but students may not recognize the connection between these activities and how and what they are learning (Appert, 2025). Similarly, students often don’t know how their participation grades are calculated and hope it will bump up their course grade instead of seeing it as a learning activity.
Tracking participation through knowledge checks and reading responses that are marked for completion and for which students get automated feedback on their learning can serve to help students see the connection between coming to class prepared, sustaining their effort over time and their participation grade (Appert, 2025).
In this model, completion of learning activities (that can be done in or out of class)—and not correctness or quality—count as a portion of the course grade.
- Have completion of daily/weekly activities count as a portion of the course grade. For the percentage of your course grade devoted to participation, specify what levels of activity completion students need to achieve an A, B, or C.
- See an example of what this can look like in the chart provided in a sample hybrid grading scheme for a non-writing class from New York University (Appert, 2025).
- For assigned readings or notetaking during lectures, you can create a reflective worksheet that structures the students’ viewing or reading experience and track the submitted worksheet as a completed activity. Your personalized worksheet based on students’ experiences and learning can also serve “double duty” to discourage students from offloading their learning by relying on GenAI to complete their assignment.
- See an example of what this kind of worksheet can look like from Cornell University: Notes format of a worksheet for lecture viewing.
- For videos, create low-stakes formative assessments to help learners understand key concepts and takeaways from the assignment (Appert, 2025). You can set up a knowledge check in a quiz on Moodle that will check students answers and record the assessment as complete.
- Having students complete knowledge checks in quizzes on Moodle or MS Forms is a way to provide students with some feedback on their learning during class, something you can’t do simply by tracking attendance. Consider having students respond to 3-5 content questions spaced across the class period. Their responses (marked as completed) on Moodle will be linked directly to the gradebook.
- The submission of artifacts, such as those listed above, can serve as completion activities. How many of these you need to complete for a corresponding grade would be described in the grading scheme for students. For example, if there were 10 possible artifacts to submit over the course of the term, students who submit 8-10 received an A, 6-7 a B, 4-5 a C, etc.
Did you know?
The activity completion setting in Moodle allows you to set completion criteria for activities or resources in your course, so you can track whether students have completed them. Learn more about Moodle’s activity completion.
Book a consultation
If you’d like to try out one of these practices and would like more direction, book a one-on-one consultation at the CTL for individualized guidance.
References
Appert, L. (2025, April 22). A hybrid approach to alternative grading. New York University. https://wp.nyu.edu/fas-edtech/2025/04/a-hybrid-approach-to-alternative-grading/
Bean, J. C., & Peterson, D. (1998). Grading classroom participation. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 74, 33-40. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.7403
