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Troy Patterson

Trouble with Rubrics - 0 views

www.alfiekohn.org/...rubrics.htm

blog.me rubrics msm290 assessment education rubric

shared by Troy Patterson on 07 Dec 14 - Cached
  • She realized that her students, presumably grown accustomed to rubrics in other classrooms, now seemed “unable to function unless every required item is spelled out for them in a grid and assigned a point value.  Worse than that,” she added, “they do not have confidence in their thinking or writing skills and seem unwilling to really take risks.”[5]
  • This is the sort of outcome that may not be noticed by an assessment specialist who is essentially a technician, in search of practices that yield data in ever-greater quantities.
  • The fatal flaw in this logic is revealed by a line of research in educational psychology showing that students whose attention is relentlessly focused on how well they’re doing often become less engaged with what they're doing.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • it’s shortsighted to assume that an assessment technique is valuable in direct proportion to how much information it provides.
  • Studies have shown that too much attention to the quality of one’s performance is associated with more superficial thinking, less interest in whatever one is doing, less perseverance in the face of failure, and a tendency to attribute the outcome to innate ability and other factors thought to be beyond one’s control.
  • As one sixth grader put it, “The whole time I’m writing, I’m not thinking about what I’m saying or how I’m saying it.  I’m worried about what grade the teacher will give me, even if she’s handed out a rubric.  I’m more focused on being correct than on being honest in my writing.”[8]
  • she argues, assessment is “stripped of the complexity that breathes life into good writing.”
  • High scores on a list of criteria for excellence in essay writing do not mean that the essay is any good because quality is more than the sum of its rubricized parts.
  • Wilson also makes the devastating observation that a relatively recent “shift in writing pedagogy has not translated into a shift in writing assessment.”
  • Teachers are given much more sophisticated and progressive guidance nowadays about how to teach writing but are still told to pigeonhole the results, to quantify what can’t really be quantified.
  • Consistent and uniform standards are admirable, and maybe even workable, when we’re talking about, say, the manufacture of DVD players.  The process of trying to gauge children’s understanding of ideas is a very different matter, however.
  • Rubrics are, above all, a tool to promote standardization, to turn teachers into grading machines or at least allow them to pretend that what they’re doing is exact and objective. 
  • The appeal of rubrics is supposed to be their high interrater reliability, finally delivered to language arts.
  • Just as it’s possible to raise standardized test scores as long as you’re willing to gut the curriculum and turn the school into a test-preparation factory, so it’s possible to get a bunch of people to agree on what rating to give an assignment as long as they’re willing to accept and apply someone else’s narrow criteria for what merits that rating. 
  • Once we check our judgment at the door, we can all learn to give a 4 to exactly the same things.
Keith Schoch

Finding Flow in Writing - 0 views

howtoteachanovel.blogspot.com/...finding-flow-in-writing.html

argumentative writing essay CCSS exemplars

shared by Keith Schoch on 29 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Keith Schoch on 29 Jan 13
     
    Great exemplars for helping students find flow in writing; in other words, the ability to stay on a topic and keep the reader with them. Good practice for expository and argumentative writing as relates to CCSS.
Troy Patterson

BoomWriter - Schools - 1 views

www.boomwriter.com/Schools

msm msm168 writing collaboration

shared by Troy Patterson on 30 May 11 - No Cached
  • Troy Patterson on 30 May 11
     
    Boomwiter supports creative writing, reading comprehension, peer editing and genre studies, to name just a few vital reading and writing skills.
Troy Patterson

Free Technology for Teachers: Seven Good Sources of Writing Prompts - 1 views

www.freetech4teachers.com/...ources-of-writing-prompts.html

msm255 writing

shared by Troy Patterson on 21 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Troy Patterson on 21 Sep 13
     
    "Quotes Daddy"
Ron King

Want to Improve Teaching? Listen to Students - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...prove-teaching-_b_3342521.html

shared by Ron King on 29 May 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 29 May 13
     
    Annie Emerson doesn't have to wonder about what it takes to help her kindergarten students learn how to write or do math. They've told her. Several times during the year, the Pinewoods Elementary School teacher asks her students two basic questions: what are ways that I teach you that you like or that are really working for you? What could be changed to help you learn even more? And it turns out even 5-year-olds have plenty to say.
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