More often, however, students spoke of the tension between their own and the teacher’s expectations. … Over and over again, students rejected their own judgments of their work in favor of guessing how their teacher or professor would grade it.”

How it works – each group member completes an evaluation on his or her team members which is then submitted to the instructor. The instructor usually takes the average of the peer evaluations, and shares this grade with each team member which serves as the student’s grade in the peer evaluation portion.

Forcing’ the individual student to assess their own behaviour, as opposed to others is more constructive – it supports the aim of developing collaboration skills, along with the knowledge component.

Eighth grade math teacher Julie Ison describes a project her classes worked on that involved graphing. Working with Excel, the students went to a few websites (preselected by the teacher) and picked data about whatever they were interested in—flavors of ice cream, baseball statistics, basketball statistics, whatever they wanted. They sucked in all the information, put it in Excel, manipulated it, made graphs out of it, and figured out what graphs went with that data, what graphs didn’t go with that data

We use Schoology as a learning management system, which many students access on their own phones if there aren’t enough devices to go around.

This flipped learning setup frees up my students to use classtime to practice their skills.

fantasy football stats during class, their motivation began to soar.

Journal of Interactive Media in Higher education found no significant difference in exam scores for students enrolled in Open Learning Initiative’s introductory statistics course (which contains adaptive learning) compared to the traditional course. Furthermore, the study also found that the OLI students took 50% less time to learn all of the content and perform the same or better relative to the traditional students

"Many of the so-called ‘adaptive learning' platforms are really more like content recommendation systems -- like Amazon or Netflix," he said. "I don't see where the learning is adaptive. The content is not changing in response to the students."

Share the rubric with your students and their parents.

“rubrics promote ‘mechanical instruction in writing’ that bypasses ‘the human act of composing and the human gesture of response’” (

More conceptually, critics claim that rubrics, in effect, dehumanize the act of writing. According to Thomas Newkirk, an English professor at the University of New Hampshire,

Give them opportunities to learn personally, to create their own texts and courses of study, and to pursue that learning with others in and out of the classroom who share a passion.

The classroom is also a practical location to give students multiple opportunities to demonstrate what they know and can do, adding to the accuracy of the information available from that level of assessment.

Most assessments developed beyond the classroom rely largely on selected-response or short-answer formats and are not designed to meet the daily, ongoing information needs of teachers and students.