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Blair Peterson

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

  • 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

Educational Leadership:Effective Grading Practices:EL Study Guide - 2 views

  • What do you think the purpose of grading is? Is it to communicate students' academic achievement to students and parents? Is it to motivate students to put forth their best effort? Some combination of both? How might that belief affect your grading practices?
  • If educators' goal is for students to learn, does it matter if it takes some students a little longer than others?
  • What's your current policy on offering redos and retakes? How did you arrive at this policy? Reflecting on the ideas Wormeli and Dueck present, how might you change your policy? If you don't offer retakes, what steps might you take to introduce them in your classes? If you do, what new ideas do you have for making the practice more effective?
Blair Peterson

Brent's Blog: Supporting No Zeroes - 0 views

  • Keep the answer book open in the back of the room.  The practice isn't graded anyways.  This sends a message that the homework is for learning, not grading.
  • But why would a student do the work if it isn't graded?  Because your homework is directly aligned to what will be on your assessments.  
  • Our goal with both programs is to get completed work, not punish kids.
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  • By the way, the students that are actually motivated by grades are not the students we are talking about with these homework programs anyways.
Blair Peterson

Should I Stop Assigning Homework? - Jessica Lahey - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • tudents who don’t complete homework receive zeroes, but they learn a valuable lesson about responsibility, many teachers argue, even though there’s no legitimate research connecting responsibility to homework. 
  • One, students, teachers, parents, and administrators expect me to, and when I don’t I am labeled an “easy” teacher, viewed as less serious or rigorous than my colleagues. Parents may rage about the veritable avalanche of homework that threatens to suffocate their children, but in my experience, parents also view that avalanche as a badge of honor, evidence of academic rigor.
  • I tried to picture a school year in which I shoehorn all of this work in to class time. I hardly complete a year’s worth of material as it is; a year without any homework at all seemed like a disaster in the making.
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  • Barnes spent that summer immersed in research on learning and homework, and returned in the 14th year of his teaching career determined to do away with homework and create what he calls a “results-only learning environment.”
  • Contrary to my first concern, Barnes found that most parents were in favor of his doing away with homework, particularly once he outlined the research for them.
  • Barnes points out that a no-homework policy does not mean that his students never work outside of class; indeed, they often do, because they enjoy the learning and want it to continue outside of class.
  • His class was a project-based classroom, so many students did choose to prepare for their projects outside of class. Barnes eliminated all work that required rote memory, and leaned more on context clues and word roots instead. “The result of eliminating traditional, mostly rote memory, homework was one of the most rewarding experiences of my teaching career,” Barnes wrote.
  • Above all else, my students enjoyed class and become intrinsically motivated independent learners.
  • I would add for the no-homework skeptics, and they are legion, you have to keep in mind that any research that supports homework is based almost universally on test results.
Blair Peterson

Teach like a video game: Use assessment as learning and motivation - cleanapple.com - M... - 1 views

  •  
    This is a very good blog post on making sense of assessment through video games. 
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