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Ed Webb

Imagining College Without Grades :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for N... - 0 views

  • A professor who tells his students that “grades are the death of composition.” Another said: “Grades create a facade of coherence.”
    • Dana Huff
       
      Interesting. I agree. I wish that we didn't have to grade student writing and could just give written or oral feedback. I love the "facade of coherence" comment.
  • politically impossible
    • Dana Huff
       
      Key words. Grading is political.
  • grades were squelching intellectual curiosity.
    • Dana Huff
       
      Totally true in more places than prestigious law schools
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  • growing use of e-portfolios
    • Dana Huff
       
      I like portfolios for demonstrating learning, but I haven't learned how to effectively integrate them into my own classroom.
  • most professors and students are much more likely to complain about grading than to praise its accuracy or value.
    • Dana Huff
       
      Amen!
  • Done right, she said, eliminating grades promotes rigor.
  • the elimination of grades — if they are replaced with narrative evaluations, rubrics, and clear learning goals — results in more accountability and better ways for a colleges to measure the success not only of students but of its academic programs.
    • Ed Webb
       
      This strikes me intuitively as correct. Grades are a substitute for thoughful assessment of learning outcomes, not an equivalent to it.
  • the idea of consistent and clear grading just doesn’t reflect the mobility of students
    • Ed Webb
       
      Absolutely. My own institution, Dickinson College, sends ~70% of its students abroad for at least a semester, and most often a year. I have experience in education in different national contexts, and grading conventions simply do not translate.
  • ending grades can mean much more work for both students and faculty members.
    • Ed Webb
       
      Aye, there's the rub. Those of us who are serious about learning - students and faculty - have to recognize that better learning is more work. On the other hand, it's more fun, too.
  • When faculty members are providing written, detailed analyses of multiple course objectives and are also — for majors — relating performance to larger goals for the major, so much more is taking place she said, than in a letter grade.
    • Ed Webb
       
      Yes. Grades are a terrible assessment tool.
  • the training that colleges provide to professors before they start producing narrative evaluations, and officials of the no-grades colleges all said that training was extensive, and that faculty members needed mentors as they started out.
    • Ed Webb
       
      And how much training do faculty get before they start handing out grades?
  • they end up favoring the evaluation system
    • Ed Webb
       
      This is the point. Users have to be educated in the advantages of the system - once they have been, they are likely to favor it over grading.
Kate Pok

Figuring Grades - 67 views

  • Always convert all grades and numbers to a system of 100. It will not only be easier for you to figure out overall grades, but it will simplify your explanations to parents and administrators if they can see your grades in terms of percents.
  • FAILING GRADES BELOW "50" ALWAYS GET MARKED AS A SCORE OF "50"
  • All letter grades are converted to a numerical equivalent, equi-spaced from each other, based on a 100 point system. Then they are averaged as you would with other grades. Here is a chart you can use: A++ = 100 (perfect paper with extra-credit) A+ = 98 A = 95 A- = 92 B+ = 88 B = 85 B- = 82 C+ = 78 C = 75 C- = 72 D+ = 68 D = 65 D- = 62 F = 55
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  • EXAMPLE: The student in the example received: 25, 80, 40, 95, 90. Average = 66%, Grade = D The student's grades should be converted to 50 , 80, 50 , 95, 90. Average = 73%, Grade = C, which is a better representation of grades of A, A-, B-, F, F.
Benjamin Light

The Costs of Overemphasizing Achievement - 83 views

  • First, students tend to lose interest in whatever they’re learning. As motivation to get good grades goes up, motivation to explore ideas tends to go down. Second, students try to avoid challenging tasks whenever possible. More difficult assignments, after all, would be seen as an impediment to getting a top grade. Finally, the quality of students’ thinking is less impressive. One study after another shows that creativity and even long-term recall of facts are adversely affected by the use of traditional grades.
    • Deb White Groebner
       
      SO true!
    • Terie Engelbrecht
       
      Very true; especially the "avoiding challenging tasks" part.
  • Unhappily, assessment is sometimes driven by entirely different objectives--for example, to motivate students (with grades used as carrots and sticks to coerce them into working harder) or to sort students (the point being not to help everyone learn but to figure out who is better than whom)
  • Standardized tests often have the additional disadvantages of being (a) produced and scored far away from the classroom, (b) multiple choice in design (so students can’t generate answers or explain their thinking), (c) timed (so speed matters more than thoughtfulness) and (d) administered on a one-shot, high-anxiety basis.
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  • The test designers will probably toss out an item that most students manage to answer correctly.
  • the evidence suggests that five disturbing consequences are likely to accompany an obsession with standards and achievement:
  • 1. Students come to regard learning as a chore.
  • intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation tend to be inversely related: The more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.
  • 2. Students try to avoid challenging tasks.
  • they’re just being rational. They have adapted to an environment where results, not intellectual exploration, are what count. When school systems use traditional grading systems--or, worse, when they add honor rolls and other incentives to enhance the significance of grades--they are unwittingly discouraging students from stretching themselves to see what they’re capable of doing.
  • 3. Students tend to think less deeply.
  • 4. Students may fall apart when they fail.
  • 5. Students value ability more than effort
    • Deb White Groebner
       
      This is the reinforcement of a "fixed mindset" (vs. (growth mindset) as described by Carol Dweck.
  • They seem to be fine as long as they are succeeding, but as soon as they hit a bump they may regard themselves as failures and act as though they’re helpless to do anything about it.
  • When the point isn’t to figure things out but to prove how good you are, it’s often hard to cope with being less than good.
  • It may be the systemic demand for high achievement that led him to become debilitated when he failed, even if the failure is only relative.
  • But even when better forms of assessment are used, perceptive observers realize that a student’s score is less important than why she thinks she got that score.
  • just smart
  • luck:
  • tried hard
  • task difficulty
  • It bodes well for the future
  • the punch line: When students are led to focus on how well they are performing in school, they tend to explain their performance not by how hard they tried but by how smart they are.
  • In their study of academically advanced students, for example, the more that teachers emphasized getting good grades, avoiding mistakes and keeping up with everyone else, the more the students tended to attribute poor performance to factors they thought were outside their control, such as a lack of ability.
  • When students are made to think constantly about how well they are doing, they are apt to explain the outcome in terms of who they are rather than how hard they tried.
  • And if children are encouraged to think of themselves as "smart" when they succeed, doing poorly on a subsequent task will bring down their achievement even though it doesn’t have that effect on other kids.
  • The upshot of all this is that beliefs about intelligence and about the causes of one’s own success and failure matter a lot. They often make more of a difference than how confident students are or what they’re truly capable of doing or how they did on last week’s exam. If, like the cheerleaders for tougher standards, we look only at the bottom line, only at the test scores and grades, we’ll end up overlooking the ways that students make sense of those results.
  • the problem with tests is not limited to their content.
  • if too big a deal is made about how students did, thus leading them (and their teachers) to think less about learning and more about test outcomes.
  • As Martin Maehr and Carol Midgley at the University of Michigan have concluded, "An overemphasis on assessment can actually undermine the pursuit of excellence."
  • Only now and then does it make sense for the teacher to help them attend to how successful they’ve been and how they can improve. On those occasions, the assessment can and should be done without the use of traditional grades and standardized tests. But most of the time, students should be immersed in learning.
  • the findings of the Colorado experiment make perfect sense: The more teachers are thinking about test results and "raising the bar," the less well the students actually perform--to say nothing of how their enthusiasm for learning is apt to wane.
  • The underlying problem concerns a fundamental distinction that has been at the center of some work in educational psychology for a couple of decades now. It is the difference between focusing on how well you’re doing something and focusing on what you’re doing.
  • The two orientations aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, but in practice they feel different and lead to different behaviors.
  • But when we get carried away with results, we wind up, paradoxically, with results that are less than ideal.
  • Unfortunately, common sense is in short supply today because assessment has come to dominate the whole educational process. Worse, the purposes and design of the most common forms of assessment--both within classrooms and across schools--often lead to disastrous consequences.
  • grades, which by their very nature undermine learning. The proper occasion for outrage is not that too many students are getting A’s, but that too many students have been led to believe that getting A’s is the point of going to school.
  • research indicates that the use of traditional letter or number grades is reliably associated with three consequences.
  • Iowa and Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills,
    • Benjamin Light
       
      I wonder how the MAP test is set?
  •  
    The message of Daniel Pinks book "Drive" applies here. Paying someone more, i.e. good grades, does not make them better thinkers, problems solvers, or general more motivated in what they are doing. thanks for sharing.
  •  
    Excellent summary!
Mary Blow

QuickGrade | The easiest FREE grade calculator for teachers! - 115 views

  •  
    Put away your EZ-graders, teachers, QuickGrade is the easiest grade calculator around! Use this tool to make grading stacks of tests a snap. Made with love and totally free to use!
Kathy Fiedler

Lexile® at School - 5 views

  •  
    "Lexile measures are powerful, versatile tools that educators can use to help their students grow as readers. When you use both Lexile reader measures and Lexile text measures, you can treat each student as an individual learner, rather than as below-grade, on-grade or above-grade. Site includes a "find a book" feature which allows you to search a book by title or author and find out the lexile level. There is a conversion chart on the site which will give you a guide to the approximate grade level equivalents as well. Here are some classroom ideas and applications to help you differentiate instruction for all readers in various situations."
Dana Huff

Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes - NYTimes.com - 0 views

    • Dana Huff
       
      I have seen this in high school, too. I think students have learned that A is doing going to be the default grade but the exceptional grade, but I have to admit C is not my defaut grade either, but a low grade.
  • “Instead of getting an A, they make an A,” he said. “Similarly, if they make a lesser grade, it is not the teacher’s fault. Attributing the outcome of a failure to someone else is a common problem.”
    • Dana Huff
       
      External locus of control seems to be attained later and later. I have many times explained this distinction to students. They see grades as something that results from how much a teacher likes them or luck more than how much effort they put in or how well they've written.
  • if students developed a genuine interest in their field, grades would take a back seat, and holistic and intrinsically motivated learning could take place.
    • Dana Huff
       
      Sadly, I wonder how realistic this is, based on what I've seen. I wish I taught in a school with no grades. They come between the student and learning.
Randolph Hollingsworth

Robinson Center for Young Scholars » Univ of Washington's Early University En... - 11 views

  •  
    If you are in 7th or 8th grade read more about the Early Entrance Program at the University of Washington, the premier early entrance program in the nation. If you are in 10th grade read more about the UW Academy for Young Scholars, the Robinson Center's early university entrance program for students offered in collaboration with the UW Honors Program. Summer Programs Do you want a fun and inspiring summer experience? If you are in 5th or 6th grade, learn more about Summer Challenge, the Robinson Center's summer program for students in elementary school. These hands-on classes provide multi-disciplinary learning experiences for three weeks during the summer on the UW-Seattle campus. If you are in 7th-10th grade learn more about Summer Stretch, the Robinson Center's summer program designed for students who want to learn a variety of subjects at an accelerated pace. Courses include math, humanities, science and writing, and are located on the UW-Seattle campus.
ashleecopper

KUSD Google Apps for Education - 41 views

    • ashleecopper
       
      Check out this link (https://www.google.com/edu/products/productivity-tools/) and other Google Apps for Education links. What are some ideas for ways that you could use this in your classroom?
  •  
    Google Apps provides filtered email to individual students in grades 2 and higher (and to classrooms of kindergarten and 1st grade students). Collaboration and other tools that are available that can be used across all subject areas.
Mary Beth  Messner

Grading essays: Humans vs. machine - USATODAY.com - 28 views

  • The testing service compared the results of E-Rater evaluations of students' papers to human grading, and to students' scores on the SAT writing test and the essay portion of the SAT writing test (which is graded by humans). ETS found very high correlations between the E-Rater grades and the SAT grades and, generally, to the human grades of the placement test.
  • In fact, Ramineni said, one of the problems that surfaced in the review was that some humans doing the evaluation were not scoring students' essays on some prompts in consistent ways, based on the rubric used by NJIT.
Anthony Giannini

Discipline - 15 views

  •      ClassPeriodSectionDaysRoomSemester Computer Information & Technology 1 1A,B167S1, S2 Computer and Information Technology 2 1B314S1, S2 Computer and Information Technology 3 2B314S1, S2 Computer Applications 4 1A,B314S1, S2 to
  • 12345
  • ClassesSearchCampusReportsActionsMissing StudentsMessagesMy Home Welcome, Anthony Giannini, today is Friday, December 6, 2019 #pnlExpand, #pnlCollapse{ padding-top: 5px; padding-bottom: 10px; } Show Cycle Day Information Hide Cycle Day Information Cycle day B in Emanuel Axelrod Education Center - John A. Flannery High School and John A. Flannery Middle School Cycle day B in Regional Education Center At Arden Hill - Marguerite A. Flood Middle School, Marguerite A. Flood High School, Academy at Arden Hill High School and Academy at Arden Hill Middle School Cycle day B in Chester School District Satellite - Chester Academy Satellite MS CurrentTodayAll Take attendance at: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 : 00 01 02 03 04 05</opti
mswanty

De-grade your classroom with narrative feedback SmartBlogs - 132 views

  • Grades, conversely, discourage learning, as students either feel like failures upon receiving low marks or have a falsely-inflated sense of accomplishment based on high marks, which are almost always subjective.
    • mswanty
       
      Do students feel this way?
  • SE2R — Summarize, Explain, Redirect and Resubmit
  • Since disdaining grades in favor of narrative feedback, I spend much more time doing what my colleagues call grading. I evaluate and re-evaluate student work daily. Project feedback is ongoing. I have 120 students so I’m writing seemingly all of the time. I’m often asked by teachers and friends, “Isn’t it a lot of work?”&nbsp; Definitely. Would I ever return to traditional grading? Never.
    • mswanty
       
      So narrative grading takes more time, but it is worth it. I am still wondering what he puts on the report card...
    • Brianna Crowley
       
      Me too! I commented on this article with some of my own reservations or obstacles with implementing this in my own classroom.
serausch

Interactive Learning and Reading Activities for Students in Grades PreK-12 | Scholastic... - 26 views

  • Story StartersGrades: PreK–K, 1–2, 3–5, 6–8This interactive tool creates quick writing prompts to help young students delve into creative writing.
  • Immigration: Stories of Yesterday and TodayGrades: PreK–K, 1–2, 3–5, 6–8Take a tour of Ellis Island, explore an interactive immigration timeline, and meet young immigrants in this online activity!
  • Science ExplorationsGrades: 3–5, 6–8, 9–12With the help of audio, text, photos, and video, students thoroughly explore six science topics, from the Galapagos Islands to giant squid.Read more &gt;
  •  
    The Science Explorations link doesn't work.
anonymous

for the love of learning: Grading without Grading - 18 views

  •  
    Joe Bower, a 6th grade teacher in Canada, shares the email and response from Alfie Kohn he sent in 2006 describing how he grades without grades.  In the comments at the bottom, many others share their approaches and struggles.
Sydney King

Text Complexity Grade Bands and Lexile Bands | The Lexile® Framework for Reading - 42 views

  • 11–CCR &nbsp;1070L–1220L 1185L–1385L
  • In the subsequent grade or grades within a band, students must "stretch" to read a certain proportion of texts from the next higher text complexity band. This pattern repeats itself throughout the grades so that students can both build on earlier literacy gains and challenge themselves with texts at a higher complexity level.
  • As students advance through the grades, they must both develop their comprehension skills and apply them to increasingly complex texts. The proportion of texts that students read each year should come from a particular text complexity grade band.
Mary Glackin

AnthonyTeacher.com » The Ultimate Google Gradebook (with Individual Score Rep... - 64 views

  •  
    Use Google Drive to create a grade book, using your favorite spreadsheet grading rubric and a script contained here that will let your students see their individual grade reports via their Gmail login.
Alias Librarian

Google Classroom: Let's Make the Grade | Teacher Tech - 55 views

  •  
    Alice Keeler gives a step by step guide to grading in Google Classroom -- plus how to export grades to your gradebook.
Jeff Andersen

How to Escape Grading Jail - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 31 views

  •  
    F or the first 18 years of my academic career, I ran into the same problem every semester. It happened at about the 13-week mark: I would share a tearful farewell with my family and begin serving my sentence in Grading Jail. In that moment, I would look back on a career of repeat offenses against efficient and timely grading of student work, and see clearly that I had no one to blame but myself. I was a hopeless recidivist.
rbatie19

Chronic Absenteeism Can Devastate K-12 Learning (Opinion) - 7 views

  • in a study of California students for Attendance Works, the organization that Hedy Chang oversees, only 17 percent of the students who were chronically absent in both kindergarten and 1st grade were reading proficiently by 3rd grade, compared with 64 percent of those with good attendance in the early years. Weak reading skills in the 3rd grade translate into academic trouble ahead: Students who aren’t reading well by that point are four times more likely to drop out of high school, according to a 2012 study released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
  • Chronic absence in middle school is another red flag that a student will drop out of high school. By high school, attendance is a better dropout indicator than test scores.
  • A recent report, “Absences Add Up,” also from Attendance Works, documents what many know from common sense: At every age, in every demographic, and in every state and city tested, students with poor attendance scored significantly lower on standardized tests. In our schools, this translates into weaker reading skills, failing grades, and higher dropout rates. Rather than looking at attendance as an administrative chore, schools can use the same data as a warning sign to change the trajectory.
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  • The results were significant. Students with mentors gained nine school days—almost two weeks—during the year. They were more likely to remain in school and maintain their grade point averages than similar students without mentors. The program worked at every K-12 level: elementary, middle, and high school, with the greatest impact on students struggling with poverty and homelessness.
  • The mentors had several simple but straightforward responsibilities. They greeted the students every day to let them know they were glad to see them at school. They called home if students were sick to find out what was happening. They connected the students and their families to resources to help address attendance barriers. Mentors participated in school-based teams that analyzed data and shared insights about students. And they also supported schoolwide activities, including assemblies, incentives, and contests, to encourage better attendance for all students.
  • Elementary schools set up attendance teams to identify and monitor the students with the worst attendance. Part-time social workers, hired with philanthropic and state dollars, connected with families. Principals and teachers promoted attendance at back-to-school nights, at parent-teacher conferences, and through regular calls home. This work led to a significant drop in absenteeism in all elementary grades, particularly in kindergarten. The percentage of chronically absent kindergartners fell from 30 percent in the 2011-12 school year to 13 percent in 2013-14. And reading scores began to climb.
Randolph Hollingsworth

National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation's Report Card: Writing 2011 - 2 views

  •  
    Asa Spencer of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute writes in the Education Gadfly Weekly: "Traditionalists cringe, tech buffs rejoice: This latest NAEP writing assessment for grades eight and twelve marks the first computer-based appraisal (by the "nation's report card") of student proficiency in this subject. It evaluates students' writing skills (what NAEP calls both academic and workplace writing) based on three criteria: idea development, organization, and language facility and conventions. Results were predictably bad: Just twenty-four percent of eighth graders and 27 percent of twelfth graders scored proficient or above. Boys performed particularly poorly; half as many eighth-grade males reached proficiency as their female counterparts. The use of computers adds a level of complexity to these analyses: The software allows those being tested to use a thesaurus (which 29 percent of eighth graders exploited), text-to-speech software (71 percent of eighth graders used), spell check (three-quarters of twelfth graders), and kindred functions. It is unclear whether use of these crutches affected a student's "language facility" scores, though it sure seems likely. While this new mechanism for assessing kids' writing prowess makes it impossible to track trend data, one can make (disheartening) comparisons across subjects. About a third of eighth graders hit the NAEP proficiency benchmark in the latest science, math, and reading assessments, compared to a quarter for writing. So where to go from here? The report also notes that twelfth-grade students who write four to five pages a week score ten points higher than those who write just one page a week. Encouraging students to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is a start."
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