The Muddiest Point

Looking for a quick way to collect feedback from your students? Read on about the Muddiest Point!

Mosteller's article The Muddiest Point in the Lecture as a feedback device Links to an external site. (scanned PDF) describes in-depth his experience in discovering and using this tool to assess student feedback. Below is an overview of the 1989 article followed by steps to implement your own feedback process using Canvas surveys.

Overview

The Minute Paper, One Sentence Summary, What's the Principle, and the Muddiest Point are popular assessment techniques that provide instructors effective feedback on what students have learned during their class. Students typically complete these assessments at the end of class.

The Muddiest Point originated in 1989 from Harvard Professor of Statistics Professor Frederick Mosteller’s who asked his students to summarize key points and what more they wanted to know. One of his students perceptively pointed out that there really wasn’t any feedback because students essentially were repeating the professor’s key points and were unable to precisely state what more they wanted to know.

So Mosteller asked what were their muddiest (least understood) points and received many important and concrete results, which he summarized. Based on these results Mosteller would prepare special handouts to address common points of confusion that would be studied by students needing this information outside of class.

At the end of class Mosteller had his students write down their muddiest points on pieces of paper, which were typed into a summary format and distributed.

Canvas Surveys

Using Canvas surveys bypasses the use of paper, retyping the comments and printing handouts, thus faciliating the process of collecting, summarizing, and sharing student feedback. Students can quickly complete the survey with their iOS or Android app or online with a web browser.

Create a Quiz with Quiz Type: Graded Survey or Ungraded Survey and check Keep Submission anonymous.

If you would like to a survey to automatically assign points as an incentive to complete the question choose Graded Survey. Regardless a Graded Survey will keep track of students who have submitted, although there responses will still be anonymous. You can put these surveys into an unweighted assignment group (e.g. Course Feedback) so they do not count in the final grade.

You can set a due date the same day as the class and an end time (e.g. 8 pm) to allow quick submissions. That way you can get the results in the early evening before the next class.

Choose the question type: Essay Question

Reporting Survey Results

Currently there is no option to easily display essay results for one question so they can quickly be copied and pasted into one document. (This was so much easier to do in ANGEL!)

Moderate This Survey allows the instructor to view individual responses as Student 1, Student 2, ...
To collect all responses at once choose Survey Statistics and click the Student Analysis button to download a CSV report of the survey responses. You can open the file into Excel or Google Sheets and copy all the responses from one column.

Comments

Canvas does not provide a way to duplicate items such as surveys so they would need to be built each time. You can organize these quick feedback surveys in the same assignment group.
A graded survey displays in the Gradebook showing actual students (with points if assigned) who have completed the survey.
SpeedGrader lists students as Student 1, Student 2, … but responses are hidden because the survey is anonymous.