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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

SMARTER TEACHER: Homework: Graded or Ungraded - 1 views

  • And yet, no dancer, no musician and no athlete gains credit for their practice except through their actual performance in the event. We do not applaud the dancer or musician during practice. We do not add statistics from practice to the athlete’s record.
  • he assessment should actually be of the effectiveness of the teacher’s instruction and in what areas the teacher should continue to provide instruction to assist student mastery.
  • Homework allows both the student and teacher to determine if there is understanding of the subject and/or where problems
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  • Students do not have equal resources for completing homework. (computer or internet, time, study space, privacy etc…) Homework that is busy work is often copied just for completion. If homework is summative then it must be graded. Often homework is merely checked off. Student homework assignments are the most likely to receive zeroes which can negatively skew the total grade that may be indicated by summative assessments. Homework should never be assigned over holidays thereby interfering with family plans. Kids do need a break. Many students have nights with hours of homework. Could students more out of 15 or 20 minutes of well planned practice rather than an hour of busy work? If homework is based on course standards then not doing the homework should naturally affect their grades on summative assessments. For this reason no separate grade should be necessary. Zeroes in homework followed by zeroes on summative assessments is punishing the student twice for that content. Failure to complete homework is a responsibility issue, and, as such, should be treated just as inattentiveness, not bringing materials, disruptiveness and similar issues. Many home help sites have blossomed in the past decade, casting doubt on how much work the student is actually completing.
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

Grading Systems - SCHOOL, HIGHER EDUCATION - Students, Grades, Teachers, and Learning -... - 1 views

  • In essence, grading is an exercise in professional judgment on the part of teachers. It involves the collection and evaluation of evidence on students' achievement or performance over a specified period of time, such as nine weeks, an academic semester, or entire school year. Through this process, various types of descriptive information and measures of students' performance are converted into grades or marks that summarize students' accomplishments. Although some educators distinguish between
  • In fact, prior to 1850, grading and reporting were virtually unknown in schools in the United States. Throughout much of the nineteenth century most schools grouped students of all ages and backgrounds together with one teacher in one-room schoolhouses, and few students went beyond elementary studies. The teacher reported students' learning progress orally to parents, usually during visits to students' homes.
  • Between 1870 and 1910 the number of public high schools in the United States increased from 500 to 10,000. As a result, subject area instruction in high schools became increasingly specific and student populations became more diverse. While elementary teachers continued to use written descriptions and narrative reports to document student learning, high school teachers began using percentages and other similar markings to certify students' accomplishments in different subject areas. This was the beginning of the grading and reporting systems that exist today.
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  • But in 1912 a study by two Wisconsin researchers seriously challenged the reliability of percentage grades as accurate indicators of students' achievement.
  • These demonstrations of wide variation in grading practices led to a gradual move away from percentage scores to scales that had fewer and larger categories. One was a three-point scale that employed the categories of Excellent, Average, and Poor. Another was the familiar five-point scale of Excellent, Good, Average, Poor, and Failing, (or A, B, C, D, and F). This reduction in the number of score categories served to reduce the variation in grades, but it did not solve the problem of teacher subjectivity.
  • At the same time, significant evidence shows that regularly checking on students' learning progress is an essential aspect of successful teaching–but checking is different from grading. Checking implies finding out how students are doing, what they have learned well, what problems or difficulties they might be experiencing, and what corrective measures may be necessary. The process is primarily a diagnostic and prescriptive interaction between teachers and students. Grading and reporting, however, typically involve judgment of the adequacy of students' performance at a particular point in time. As such, it is primarily evaluative and descriptive.
  • To ensure a fairer distribution of grades among teachers and to bring into check the subjective nature of scoring, the idea of grading based on the normal probability, bell-shaped curve became increasingly popular. By this method, students were simply rank-ordered according to some measure of their performance or proficiency. A top percentage was then assigned a grade of A, the next percentage a grade of B, and so on. Some advocates of this method even specified the precise percentages of students that should be assigned each grade, such as the 6-22-44-22-6 system.
  • Grading on the curve was considered appropriate at that time because it was well known that the distribution of students' intelligence test scores approximated a normal probability curve. Since innate intelligence and school achievement were thought to be directly related, such a procedure seemed both fair and equitable. Grading on the curve also relieved teachers of the difficult task of having to identify specific learning criteria. Fortunately, most educators of the early twenty-first century have a better understanding of the flawed premises behind this practice and of its many negative consequences.
Blair Peterson

Grades, Learning, and Change - Leading, Learning, Questioning - 1 views

  • “If you had the choice for your next grade, would you choose an 88 that you really worked hard for and learned something to earn or 95 where you won’t remember anything after the grade and didn’t learn throughout the process?”
  • Two students asked pointed questions about how a no grades classroom would work with eligibility for sports and extracurriculars.
  • “Why don’t teachers do this?”
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  • How satisfied are you with your/your school’s grading practices? What would ideal grading practices look like to you? What is one thing you could change to move toward that ideal? What makes talking about the shift from grading to assessment worth it? Any tips for the those interested in the transition?
Blair Peterson

The Literate Learner - InterActive Six Trait Writing Process - 0 views

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    Site where students and teachers can practice giving feedback and scoring essays using the 6+1 traits rubric.
Blair Peterson

Practical PBL: The Ongoing Challenges of Assessment | Edutopia - 1 views

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    Good ideas for assessing and grading group projects.
Blair Peterson

http://elschools.org/sites/default/files/Progress%20Report%20Explanation_Ody_1113.pdf - 0 views

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    Note to parents on Odyssey grading and reporting practices.
Blair Peterson

http://elschools.org/sites/default/files/Odyssey%20School%20Assessment%20PP.pdf - 0 views

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    Presentation from Odyssey school on grading and reporting practices.
Blair Peterson

http://www.apsva.us/cms/lib2/va01000586/centricity/domain/63/hanover_research_--_effect... - 0 views

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    Hanover Research Report on Effective Grading Practices
Blair Peterson

Educational Leadership:Effective Grading Practices:Five Obstacles to Grading Reform - 1 views

  • Teachers sometimes think that reporting multiple grades will increase their grading workload. But those who use the procedure claim that it actually makes grading easier and less work (Guskey, Swan, & Jung, 2011a). Teachers gather the same evidence on student learning that they did before, but they no longer worry about how to weigh or combine that evidence in calculating an overall grade. As a result, they avoid irresolvable arguments about the appropriateness or fairness of various weighting strategies.
  • Teachers also indicate that students take homework more seriously when it's reported separately. Parents favor the practice because it provides a more comprehensive profile of their child's performance in school (Guskey, Swan, & Jung, 2011b).
  • At the same time, no research supports the idea that low grades prompt students to try harder. More often, low grades prompt students to withdraw from learning. To protect their self-images, many students regard t
Blair Peterson

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

  • 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
       
      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
       
      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.”
Blair Peterson

Ensuring Critical Thinking in Project-Based Learning « The Whole Child Blog «... - 0 views

  • Through repeated practice, you can create a rigorous driving question that is open-ended, complex, and at the same time kid-friendly. A driving question is not “Google-able” but may contain many “on-the-surface” questions.
  • If the project is for an outside audience, the purpose may become more complex, because that audience’s lens and needs are unique and challenging. If you pick an audience outside of the classroom and a purpose that is rigorous and challenging, then the project will require some critical thinking.
  • Don’t forget that when you demand critical-thinking skills, then you must scaffold these thinking skills with lessons, modeling, and so forth
Blair Peterson

Rick Wormeli: Redos, Retakes, and Do-Overs, Part Two - YouTube - 1 views

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    I've put into practice what Wormeli advices (some of it I was already doing). Not sure what the results will be.
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    Brenda, tell us more about what you've been trying with students. I also look forward to hearing the results. Thanks for commenting.
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

Teacher newsmagazine - 0 views

  • In the years from 1911 to 1960, school systems experimented with various letter and number reporting conventions. Percentage grading was the most popular system during the latter half of the 19th and the early part of the 20th century. In that system, the teacher assigned each student a number between 0 and 100 supposedly reflecting the percentage of the material that the student had learned. T
  • One well-known system, which evenly distributes the grades on either side of a bell-shaped curve, would automatically fail a certain proportion of any given group—even in a group composed of known high achievers. Research has shown that rigid adherence to such practices can be very damaging to students.
Blair Peterson

Education Week Teacher: Best Practice: Formative Assessment Done Right - 2 views

  • Grant Wiggins says this about the feedback we give based on formative assessment: "Feedback is value-neutral help on worthy tasks. It describes what the learner did and did not do in relation to her goals. It is actionable information, and it empowers the student to make intelligent adjustments when she applies it to her next attempt to perform."
  • It’s information for me, but just as importantly, it’s information my students can use to achieve more and perform at higher levels.
  • Grades don’t tell them much about what they need to learn or what they need to do better. When students earn a "C," they may feel like failures, but they have little idea what to do to improve their skills.
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  • Once I realized how little help a grade was for students, I changed things—big time! Now they get the feedback they need to gauge their own progress. Sometimes my feedback is on the content of the curriculum and sometimes on foundational skills.
  • My formative feedback at each step of the way let students see how to improve their notes or summaries and whether they needed to look for more examples of the laws. From the first drafts I read, I could tell they had no idea how to write these kinds of descriptions. I had to create writing frames so that students could learn specific patterns of writing and how to use simple math calculations from their lab work to support their ideas.
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