Do you wish your students would complete the electronic worksheets without a constant barrage of reminders?
Are you looking for ways to use the electronic worksheets to foster participation and engagement in the material?
As a teacher, you know worksheets are vital in helping your students learn the most important information from the eLearning lessons. By completing worksheets, your students will better retain those details for their assessments and future careers.
But to many of your students, worksheets are just seen as “busy work.” So how can you get your students to do the work without chasing them down?
In this article, you’ll learn six tips to increase student participation on electronic worksheets:
Depending on your preferences, one or more of these ideas will be a great way to increase your students’ worksheet engagement.
Incorporate Worksheets as Daily Bell-Ringers
Encourage students to complete worksheets by using the worksheet questions as daily bell-ringers.
Each day, ask a different student to share their answer to a worksheet question they should have completed in the past week.
This will keep your students on their toes and encourage participation so they aren’t called out for not doing work in front of their peers.
Enforce Deadlines for Worksheet Completion
One way teachers increase worksheet participation is by putting hard deadlines on completion.
At the start of each unit, tell your students their participation grade is based on this deadline.
On the due date, export the worksheets, and you’ll have a record of all students that completed the work.
Require Students to Hand In Their Worksheets to You
When you enable the student export for the electronic worksheets in your classes, you can require your students to upload their completed worksheets on a regular basis.
On the designated date (or randomly), ask students to export their worksheets and upload them to your LMS. This could be done after each unit or module, depending on your preferences.
This approach will hold your students accountable for doing the work and turning it in on time.
Bonus: Some teachers add the worksheets to student portfolios and make their students responsible for exporting and printing their completed electronic worksheets for their portfolios.
Mix in Random Spot-Checks
To save yourself time reviewing or grading every worksheet, randomly choose one worksheet to spot-check for accuracy or completion.
Give students clear expectations that all worksheets are to be completed, then do a spot check on a varying basis.
With this approach, you’ll see students stay on pace with their worksheets alongside their eLearning lessons, and they’ll have no excuse to act surprised if points are deducted.
Use Worksheets for Class-Wide Activities
In place of grading or manually reviewing student worksheets, many teachers use them as the backbone of class participation points.
These are the most common ways teachers use worksheets for participation points:
Hold class discussions
Facilitate a review
Incorporate peer reviews
Hold Class Discussions
Some teachers use the worksheets as a starting point for class discussions, noting which students participate and which students sit silently.
Before the discussion, you can export the completed worksheets yourself. You can also give bonus points to students who complete the worksheet, export, print, and bring it to class in preparation for the discussion.
Facilitate a Review
Teachers will facilitate a review of the worksheet material with their students, asking students to share what they answered and providing guidance as needed.
This review is particularly helpful ahead of any certification preparation and gives students time to work through corrections on their questions.
Incorporate Peer Reviews
To mix things up, you can split students into smaller groups or pairs for a peer review.
Group work is engaging and gives you time to circle and hear multiple students interacting in the topic.
In all of these examples, your students could make corrections on their devices or export completed worksheets for corrections by hand.
These strategies allow you to gauge which students understand the material and which students are not retaining the material from the eLearning lessons.
Assign Grades for Your Students’ Worksheets
If you want a more strict approach to enforce worksheet completion, grading them outright is the best option for you.
Depending on how detailed you want to be, you can assign grades according to accuracy, completion, or spot-checks.