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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.
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?
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    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!
Randolph Hollingsworth

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

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    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."
meghankelly492

Legislation and Common Law Impacting Assessment Practices in Music Education - Oxford H... - 1 views

  • Russell and Austin (2010) have claimed that in music education, a system of benign neglect in assessment practices has been allowed to endure, even though there has (p. 4) been a long-term, consistent call for reform, for more meaningful assessments, and for policymakers to adapt to laws as they are enacted and court rulings as they are handed down.
  • ead to the growing body of scholarship in educational law, the evolving and more active role courts are taking in impacting educational practices,
  • chapter is to inform music teachers about contemporary court cases that have resulted in rulings on assessment issues in educational settings, and how these rulings impact assessment in the music classroom.
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  • in teacher preparation programs and in professional development activities so that students and in-service music educators will better be able to negotiate the increasingly litigious educational world
  • egal issues facing music educators remain one of the least important topics of conversation for preservice music educators.
  • how active they have been willing in inserting their decisions in school-based assessment policy.
  • Historically, courts have been somewhat deferential to school leaders and have not been willing to hear too many cases dealing with educational law and assessment.
  • Based on this decision, courts would be more likely to defer to school leaders in making their final rulings.
  • distinguish issues are purely academic from those that are purely disciplinary.
  • s. Three basic factors must exist for constitutional due process to exist: a student must have proper notice, a student must be given the chance to be heard, and the hearing should be conducted in a fair manner
  • The court decided that denying a student of education, regardless of the amount of time, could not be considered an inconsequential thing and claimed that a person’s right to education was equitable to the rights to liberty and property. In the majority decisions, the Supreme Court justices argued:
  • The US Supreme Court’s decision in Goss created the opportunity for students, parents, and their representatives to challenge not only disciplinary suspensions and expulsions but also other decisions by school officials that may affect liberty or property rights, including grades and grading policies.
  • that of courts taking a more active role and deferring less often to school leaders.
  • Because of these high stakes (real or imagined),
  • little more than attendance and participation, others feel that grades must represent academic achievement and that “allowing non-academic factors to affect academic grades distorts the truth about students’
  • however, because music is addressed minimally in these laws, their enactment has had minimal direct impact on music educators’ assessment practices.
Andrew Spinali

Assessment of Learning with a Competency-Based System: How to Start | Connected Principals - 77 views

  • In a sense, a formative assessment is practice and is, therefore, not heavily weighted in the grading system.” At Sanborn Regional High School, summative assignments must account for at least 90% of a final course grade.
  • We do not make use of averaging by quarters or trimesters to compute a student’s final course grade. Instead, our students know that their grade will be calculated based on all of their work for the entire course.  
  • Reassessment: Reassessment is an important part of any competency-based grading system. Students learn at different rates, and they need multiple chances to demonstrate mastery of a competency or skill.
Sharin Tebo

The Importance of Low-Stakes Student Feedback | ASSESSMENT | MindShift | KQED News - 62 views

  • culture of learning” instead of a “culture of earning.”
  • Creating that kind of culture isn’t easy, but Bull continually goes back to formative assessment as the key.
  • “I find that formative assessment tends to be the most important aspect of a learning assessment plan,” he said. “It has the most impact on a student’s learning.”
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  • grade-less report card, where words like “outstanding” or “needs improvement” are used in place of letter or number grades.
  • digital or paper portfolios that display a collection of student work. “It’s a very reflective process,” said Bull. It works best if students analyze their own body of work
  •  
    Low-Stakes Student Feedback & Assessment
H DeWaard

Blended and Online Assessment Taxonomy Infographic - e-Learning Infographicse-Learning ... - 45 views

  •  
    The Blended and Online Assessment Taxonomy Infographic presents types of activities and grading and feedback criteria to help you plan better assessments.
Amy Roediger

iDoceo for paperless recordkeeping for the iPad - 20 views

  •  
    A grade book, planner, diary, schedule and resource manager all in one app. Its spreadsheet engine will calculate averages as you input your assessment data. You can insert and edit any kind of information for a class, student and semester visually, no more boring spreadsheets. Scroll, expand, filter, export, import and view your information at any time. No internet connection is required. iDoceo will work with any kind of grading system, you can even create your own. You will not miss you old paper grade book again.
Ed Webb

The Wired Campus - Duke Professor Uses 'Crowdsourcing' to Grade - The Chronicle of High... - 0 views

  • Learning is more than earning an A says Cathy N. Davidson, the professor, who recently returned to teach English and interdisciplinary studies after eight years in administration. But students don't always see it that way. Vying for an A by trying to figure out what a professor wants or through the least amount of work has made the traditional grading scale superficial, she says.
  • "Do all the work, you get an A. Don't need an A? Don't have time to do all the work? No problem. You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart.  You do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points.  Add up the points, there's your grade. Clearcut. No guesswork. No second-guessing 'what the prof wants.' No gaming the system," Ms. Davidson wrote Sunday in a blog post detailing her strategy on hastac.org (pronounced "haystack"), the acronym for  "humanities, arts, science, and technology-advanced collaboration.," which she co-founded.
  • It's important to teach students how to be responsible contributors to evaluations and assessment. Students are contributing and assessing each other on the Internet anyway, so why not make that a part of learning?"
Martin Burrett

Early intervention is better for children overcoming reading difficulties - 5 views

  •  
    "A University of Alberta education researcher who achieved dramatic results with early assessment and intervention to help Grade 1 and 2 students with reading difficulties says there's still a chance to help these students in Grade 3. George Georgiou, a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, along with his collaborators Rauno Parrila at Macquarie University and Robert Savage from the University College of London, started working with 290 Grade 1 students from 11 Edmonton public schools in 2015-16."
Lisa C. Hurst

Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 9 views

  •  
    "AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY. ISSIE LAPOWSKY DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.04.15. 05.04.15 TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM. 7:00 AM INSIDE THE SCHOOL SILICON VALLEY THINKS WILL SAVE EDUCATION Click to Open Overlay Gallery Students in the youngest class at the Fort Mason AltSchool help their teacher, Jennifer Aguilar, compile a list of what they know and what they want to know about butterflies. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED SO YOU'RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend's neighbor's sister. It's prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools-with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning-just aren't cutting it. At the same time, you're thinking: this school is kind of weird. On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can't quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about. Then there's the guy who's standing at the front of the conference room, the school's founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he's unlike any school administrator you've ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say. And so, if you are truly fed up with the school stat
smilex3md

Massive MOOC Grading Problem - Stanford HCI Group Tackles Peer Assessment - moocnewsand... - 1 views

  •  
    "Six weeks into Coursera's Passion Driven Statistics course from Wesleyan University, students received a notice that they would participate in a new kind of peer-based grading exercise for their final projects."
Aly Kenee

Assessment Carnival: More Than Quizzes and Tests | Edutopia - 124 views

  •  
    Avoiding ambiguous and meaningless grades ("quiz 5") and replacing with skills-based assessment. Heavy PBL focus.
Amy Roediger

MasteryScan Turns Your iPad Into a Grading Machine | iPad Apps for School - 84 views

  •  
    MasteryScan is a new iPad app from MasteryConnect that turns your iPad into a bubble sheet scanner. With the free iPad app installed just take a picture of a bubble sheet and MasteryScanner will quickly grade it for you. The grades will automatically synchronize with your online MasteryConnect account.
Matt Renwick

Why some schools are giving letter grades a fail - The Globe and Mail - 41 views

  • Instead of reporting to parents only two or three times a year, teachers began regularly communicating using an online student portfolio system called Fresh Grade.
  • ritish education researchers Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam published a widely-cited article demonstrating how increasing descriptive feedback raises student academic achievement
    • Matt Renwick
       
      Inside the Black Box
  • Instead of Ms. Samson telling students how they are doing, they are expected to articulate to her what they learned in class, how it relates to their learning goals and where they’re struggling.
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  • standardized tests don’t predict later life success such as employment and income level
  • Ms. Samson is still required to give students a letter grade at the end of each semester, but the letters have taken on a whole new meaning to her and her students.
  • The move away from grades matches a growing belief among employers that traditional assessment is not the best way to help students develop the skills they need to succeed in today’s world.
Roland Gesthuizen

the five stages of grading | not that kind of doctor - 108 views

  •  
    "In coping with grading, it's important for graduate students and young professors to know that they are not alone and that this process takes time. Not everyone goes through every stage or processes the reality of grading in this order, but everyone experiences some version of at least two of these steps."
  •  
    This article lists the experience that most teachers go through over a weekend when they are faced with a huge marking task, clearly identifying the 5 different stages that they will probably go through.
Dallas McPheeters

Collaboration Rubric - 140 views

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    Grading team work can be made simpler by having team members grade themselves and their team members using this rubric. Teams can take turns grading a weekly discussion throughout the semester and save the instructor time while helping students develop critical thinking skills.
  •  
    One has to be very critical with such rubrics. This one implies that argument is a negative trait and that to earn maximum points, one must always agree. The rubric communicates that this is what cooperation is all about. Agreement. Argument or constructive criticism is essential to the collaborative problem-solving process. This category needs to be redesigned or removed altogether. The "makes fair decisions" attribute is much more appropriate.
Roland Gesthuizen

Why A Badge Is Better Than an A+ - Getting Smart by Alison Anderson - badges, EdTech, I... - 61 views

  • A traditional “A-F” report card doesn’t inspire that type of insight for the students or the people they need to share it with in order to get into high school or college or get a job. A collection of badges from classroombadges.com would be much more like sharing a personal “yearbook” of academic accomplishments. I love that idea.
  •  
    "I admit this title makes a pretty bold statement for a society that pretty much uses the first five letters of the alphabet to define every child from about age 5 until adulthood. But, I am hearing more and more about the use of badges in the classroom, especially in conversations about gamification and self motivation."
  •  
    I have been trying out some grading apps and am intrigued by ActivGrade because instead of being focused on a letter grade A-F, I could see students being more concerned with mastering a goal. Their "grade" is a color toward mastery of a standard. Red means I have a lot of work to do to master this, yellow means I'm making progress toward mastery and green means I've mastered this goal at this point. One grading algorithm to choose from in the app is a calculation which puts a 75% weight on the student's most recent assignment for a given concept. This means that as I get better at a skill, my most recent attempt at showing my mastery over the skill is worth more for my grade than my prior attempts. This seems like smart grading practice to me.
Roland Gesthuizen

for the love of learning: Opting out of Grading Revised - 1 views

  • Assessment is not a spreadsheet -- it's a conversation
  •  
    "One of the many reasons I blog is so that I can learn from others and rethink my own understandings. In light of the comments, I've revised the letter that I drafted to my children's teacher about opting them out of grading."
Deborah Baillesderr

CommonLit | Free Fiction & Nonfiction Literacy Resources, Curriculum, & Assessment Mate... - 53 views

  •  
    Great resource for CCSS-ELA. This site is geared for grades 5-12. The library is full of informational and literature text that can be found by lexile range, grade level, theme, genres, device or standards. You have the ability to get paired text, related media (videos), a teacher guide, and a parent guide. Assessment and discussion questions are included that asked students to prove their answers using passages from the text. Truly worth checking out.
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