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.

In my math classes this year I’m trying to develop and encourage a thinking classroom. Best practices include dialogue and problem solving, along with spaced practice and with guided examples. For some students they have entered math 8 with less than ideal fluency. The question for me is, what is the best way to approach this? I think lots of students would benefit from increasing their fluency and speed with math facts.

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.

Something just dawned on me and I wanted to write it down before I forget. Maybe this is already obvious to many people but it was a new realization for myself. In physics I stress that Work is a transfer of energy in or out of a system. I don’t specifically invoke the “Work-Energy” theorem, as I really try to stress that work can be found by analyzing the transfers of energy.

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.

This year in Science 9 I wanted the students to be able to perform a task for their final assessment in the electricity unit. Besides all the theory and concepts, I felt that after studying dc circuits the kids should be able to do something with it. Enter the Black Box Test. The general idea is that each black box has 3 to 4 light bulbs on it with the wires hidden.

I have many more updated posts on my 180 day photo blog which can be found here: https://bcphysics180.wordpress.com/

The topic of Midyear exams has been raised at our secondary school with a lot of opposition to the school not conducting them. There at least three views pitted against each other: teachers that want midyear exams, the board administration which doesn’t want to make accommodations for midyear exams, and teachers which don’t want midyear exams. History I can’t give a detailed history on midyear exams but I can give a brief overview.