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Blair Peterson

Elon U. Has Been Working to Reinvent the Transcript. And That Has Given It Some Eye-ope... - 0 views

www.edsurge.com/...given-it-some-eye-opening-data

assessment Report Cards reporting Grading and Reporting

shared by Blair Peterson on 20 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Parks, the university’s registrar, says this allowed the university to “deepen and expand” the experiences on the transcripts, capture more data and clean up a lot of the data that existed in the system.
  • “Fewer and fewer places are requesting the academic transcript, they’re really only used for graduate school,” Parks says. “So our thought process was, let’s make a transcript more meaningful.”
  • One of the things Elon noticed was that its African American male students didn’t become as engaged in the five co-curricular experiences Elon tracks (which are leadership, service, internships, global engagement and undergraduate research) until their third year at Elon, compared to their white peers who got involved in similar activities sooner.
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  • The data also indicated that if students take part in leadership early in their academic careers, their retention rate is higher.
  • Parks says with the metrics from the co-curricular data, department chairs, deans and institutional researchers are able to “mine down on the level of experiences” the students in a given major or degree program are having.
  • Parks adds that the data can even reveal the level of engagement by advisor, adding that if you control for other factors like a students’ living and learning community, it appears that advisors have a “pretty significant impact” on students’ level of engagement.
  • “Here’s this 100 plus year-old thing, formally produced, tracked and managed by basically every university that nobody uses," he says. "There’s an interesting question embedded in that—why not? And if it’s not used, what’s wrong with it? And if there’s something wrong with it, well, maybe we should do something about that. Maybe that should be better.”
Blair Peterson

Education Week - 0 views

mobile.edweek.org/c.jsp

assessment AssessmentandEvaluation Report Cards transcripts feedback

shared by Blair Peterson on 27 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • For example, in high school, each subject teacher gets one line to present a letter grade or a number grade (sometimes without any kind of precision or explanation as to what the criteria is) and up to three pre-written comment codes to help explain the grade. Often, these pre-written comments don't have anything to do with quality of work or skill level, but focus on behavior and compliance.
  • happens three times a year in many schools.
  • parent/teacher conferences
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  • In an ideal world, teachers would be empowering students regularly with feedback that isn't aligned with grades but rather with mastery standards, offering multiple opportunities for growth.
  • Here are things we can do differently today:
  • When we think about preparing students for the world we live in, accountability is important, but teaching students to be accountable in a way that works for them that also helps us know where we need to adjust practice to better suit their needs.
Blair Peterson

What Makes a Grade? | ASCE's 2017 Infrastructure Report Card - 0 views

www.infrastructurereportcard.org/...what-makes-a-grade

assessment grading AssessmentandEvaluation criteria standards

shared by Blair Peterson on 11 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Blair Peterson on 11 Mar 17
     
    I think that it's interesting that this organization uses the A - F symbols. People automatically assume that they know what they mean since they went to school. Do they?
Blair Peterson

Educational Leadership:Effective Grading Practices:Starting the Conversation About Grading - 1 views

www.ascd.org/...onversation-About-Grading.aspx

grading practices assessment learning

shared by Blair Peterson on 12 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • When schools or school districts begin discussing grading practices, they usually have an agenda. A team of administrators may have decided that district grading practices and policies should move from conventional to standards-based, learning-focused practices. Or the push for grading reform may come from teachers who see a disconnect between standards-based instruction and conventional grading practices (Brookhart, 2011).
  • Some think about the motivational aspect of grades:
  • grades
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  • Teacher-written comments can communicate a wide variety of observations, evidence, questions, and conclusions about students. For now, we are just talking about academic grades.
  • Not everyone believes that grades should reflect only achievement.
  • With most conventional grading practices, one grade sums up achievement in a subject, and that one grade often includes effort and behavior.
  • Merely tweaking the details of a grading system can result in a system that makes even less sense than the one it was intended to replace.
  • Many schools get caught up in debates that amount to tinkering with the reporting scale while maintaining otherwise conventional grading practices.
Blair Peterson

Tech's Favorite School Faces Its Biggest Test: the Real World | WIRED - 1 views

www.wired.com/...-faces-biggest-test-real-world

personalized innovation technology

shared by Blair Peterson on 29 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • Last year, according to Summit administrators, 74 percent of Summit students met or exceeded Common Core standards for English Language Arts on California’s state tests, compared to 49 percent of students statewide, and 51 percent of Summit students met or exceeded the standards for math, compared to 37 percent statewide. The college acceptance rate for Summit graduates perennially pushes 100 percent.
    • Blair Peterson
      Blair Peterson on 29 Jan 17
       
      Amazing that the overall results are so low. How can this be? Another piece of data around lower performance in math.
  • Even some of personalized learning’s biggest backers admit that it’s easy to get it wrong.
  • “Personalized learning is easy to bastardize. It’s easy to do it superficially.”
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  • Last August, for instance, the Center on Reinventing Public Education published a brief field report from their ongoing study of personalized-learning initiatives warning that some schools focus on the “iconography” of personalized learning — the technology or the project-based learning — but sacrifice rigor.
    • Blair Peterson
      Blair Peterson on 29 Jan 17
       
      This is something that we always strive for. Rigor has to be the standard.
  • “When I walk into a classroom and see all the kids on a computer, mostly on the same screen, and the teacher is moving around the room like a test proctor, that is where we’ve gone way wrong and need to right the ship,”
  • The only prerequisites for would-be Basecamp schools are a commitment to Summit’s grading policy, a one-to-one ratio of computers to students and a team of at least four teachers covering the core academic subjects for about 100 students.
  • “Historically, there are virtually no game-changers in the history of school innovations,” said Justin Reich, executive director of MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab and the author of Education Week’s EdTechResearcher blog.
  • “I’m not spoon-feeding them anything,” she explained. “That’s a relief, because there’s a lot less of me trying to run around and help everybody with little details, and more of us having conversations about math.”
  • According to Riley, the personalized learning advocates wrongly assume that all students are able to effectively guide their own learning.
  • Christina Nguyen, a ninth-grader at Summit Denali. Nguyen was working on quadratic equations with her friend, Chloe Starbird
  • Summit requires Basecamp schools to follow its practice of basing 30 percent of grades on mastery of content and 70 percent on students’ use of various cognitive skills, such as making inferences and clearly communicating their ideas.
  • While Summit’s PLP does include tests of content knowledge for each subject, students take them only when they feel ready and, if they fail, can re-take them until they pass. Some Walsh parents, such as Paula Swift, whose sixth-grade son, Trevor, is in the Summit program, are fully supportive of this “mastery-based” grading.
  • Other parents are puzzled by the approach. “I’ve definitely heard from at least 10 parents who are like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ ” O’Connor said. ” ‘Is this good for my child?’
  • “I used to fail a lot of math tests. But now, I love school math, because I’m learning better.”
  • Benjamin Riley, who visited many personalized-learning classrooms from 2010 to 2014 as the policy and advocacy director for the NewSchools Venture Fund. Shortly after leaving that post, Riley planted his skeptic’s flag with an oft-cited blog post titled, “Don’t Personalize Learning.”
  • At the start of the year, her students were often frustrated, and she had to resist the urge to step in and rescue them. For nearly two months of school, she said, “It was tough. There were tears.”
  • Logically, this concern about the need for guidance heightens with novice learners.
  • “When you have little ones, it’s harder to do the full, self-directed learning. There needs to be a lot more scaffolding and support,” said Loughlin, singling out her school’s structured and deliberate literacy instruction. “We need to set a strong foundation. We don’t want to create gaps in our learning for our little ones.”
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