I’ve been interested in assessment and reporting from the start of my teacher trainging, and it’s been the biggest focus of my Professional Development as a teacher. In the past two years I’ve been involved in communicating student learning (CSL) working groups with my school district. One of the motivators for these working groups is to get our pedagogy and procedures in-line with the new curriculum. In this blog post I want to briefly discuss the intersection of CSL and pedagogy.
I’ll be teaching both physics 11 and physics 12 again next year and I’m interested in doing more performance task assessments than I did this year. I had intended on using more goal-less problems in ph11 this year but I always felt like I was under the gun for time constraints. As for ph12 next year, my co-worker is interested in sharing some common assessment strategies between his classes and mine.
One thing I’ve been trying to implement more and more into my units are Performance Tasks. McTighe and Wiggins in their Understanding by Design framework say that a Performance Task is an authentic assessment where students demonstrate the desired understandings. In my context, I currently use small SBG quizzes for the bulk of my assessments. Jay McTighe, who I had the pleasure and privilege of having lunch with, would probably call my quizzes “supplementary” evidence.
A few weeks ago in Physics 11 I decided to return to my previous SBG scheme. I had started the year using a level scale. The reason was because I wanted to give specific difficulty targets for learning objectives. However, this method turned out to be too confusing, especially for the students. I had the feeling that my students really had only a small understanding of what or how they were assessing their work.
I’m really kicking myself for not getting this ready before the Catalyst conference in Richmond. I’ve created a form where attendees, or anyone else interest in SBG, can input their name, email address and whether or not they want to be added to a list of SBG users. What I/we actually do with this list is a whole other question… Maybe I can sort names and just let people know who else is doing SBG in their district.
I hosted a workshop on SBG at today’s BCScTA conference, links from today are here.
A few extra thoughts about questions I got today:
Am I worried about not having larger tests, as a way to partly help prepare kids for university?
No, not really. I think that anything done at university is so drastically different from what we do in high school that have a 65 minute test won’t help.
Here is a quick summary of my SBG scheme:
I give out shorter quizzes and generally avoid unit tests There are no differences between quiz or tests, quiz questions or test questions Quizzes have any where from 1 to 5 learning objectives on them Each quiz is graded according to objectives, not marks Each objective is graded out of 3: 1 is a start, 2 means some understanding is shown (any amount really), 3 means mastery Quiz questions are generally at the level of “normal” questions.
As It Stands After two months of I decided to return to my previous system of SBG objectives. Read on to see what I had tried but ultimately didn’t continue with. This year was once again fairly successful with SBG. I managed to work the Transfer Tasks into my system OK, which made me feel better about students that get all “mastered” on their learning objectives. However, I’m still not satisfied with how this works out.
This year was my fifth year in using Standards Based Grading (SBG). I’ve posted about my SBG system before but I’d like to give an update on what I’m doing.
I give out shorter quizzes and generally avoid unit tests There are no differences between quiz or tests, quiz questions or test questions Quizzes have any where from 1 to 5 4 learning objectives on them Each quiz is graded according to objectives, not marks Each objective is graded out of 3: 1 is a start, 2 means some understanding is shown (any amount really), 3 means mastery Standards are split into 2 categories: A and B.
Since the BC government announced changes to the graduation requirements for students in BC, I’ve read quite a lot of different ideas about what this means for students and our society as a whole. Lots of the discussion revolves around student learning and university acceptance.
First of all, I think a lot of people outside of the educational community don’t realize the current state of provincial exams. 4 of the 5 exams being canceled are in grades 10 and 11, most grade 12 exams were removed 10 years ago.
